March 31, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Thursday morning, the thirty-first day of March, 2011, very dark at the moment, as the sun has not risen as of yet…according to Reuters News, that ‘darkness issue’ will soon correct itself, as, this just in, the sun will rise in the next half hour, or roughly 5:30 a.m., EDT. Now that “that” is cleared up, what else is happening around the world? Well, Japan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Ireland, and Bahrain, and that’s just the countries we are currently obsessed about–as we… considering arming, are a little worried about, even more worried about, trying to forget, have forgotten, don’t even know why it’s on the list, very proud of, interested in setting up a ‘world corporate headquarters at’ (for tax purposes), and last, but certainly not least, wondering where our hypocrisy ends. As the rhetoric heats up on the ‘right’ side of the aisle, an aisle that was hostilely taken over by the teabagging revolution, a fine fake roots corporate sponsored party, all inclusive, unless, of course, you are black, Muslim, gay, a woman who may be pregnant and is pro-choice, or a talk show liberal tree huggin’ communist bastard who sold out his kind by leaving the corporate world. Welcome HOME America! Pop quiz, how do you know when you are a red neck? You arrive at your family reunion and the first loving member of your family comes up to you and hisses, “what are you lookin’ at?” The very real possibility of a government shut down looms, as we have now apparently entered into a third war in Libya, facing a real dilemma, as perhaps one thousand ‘freedom fighters’ fight on with no real weapons, training, or guidance. These rebels, who are in real fear of an insane and brutal, terrorist dictator, wonder what is next in this ‘coalition’ effort of a dozen or so countries, namely, the United States of America, Britain, and France. The rest of the world, notably China, Russia, India, Brazil, and Germany have all abstained from participation in what may be just what the doctor ordered in taking our collective minds off what is happening right here in the good ‘ole US of A. Ohio is burning, with John Kasich, the very fine republican governor, pulling the plug on collective bargaining in that state yesterday, with thousands protesting, just like they did in Wisconsin, as REPUBLICORP systematically attempts to take over this country one ‘broke’ state at a time–destroying the middle class and turning it’s citizens against each other, as the corporate overlords watch the fray unfold from atop a mountain top, say Aspen, Colorado, far away from danger. Thanks brothers KOCH!, we will be watching your every move in the coming days here at seacapecod.net! and for more on their movements to hijack America, while simultaneously making the “American People” feel sorry for them, a classic Stockholm Syndrome that will go down in history as one of the all time great definitions and fruition’s of that state of mind, please remember to check out ‘kochbrothersexposed.com’, for it will clear up quite a few things you will not hear on GE’s NBC news. The situation in Japan has not improved and it brings nuclear energy into a brighter spotlight than before, for our 104 nuclear power plants in this country are not only past their ‘due date’, bringing home the reality of what could happen in this country, via what is happening in Japan, where the radiation levels in the sea of Japan, just outside of the Fukushima plant, where the near melt down took place, still emitting dangerous levels of radiation where officials now warn it’s residents that they should evacuate at least 40 kilometers outside of the plants boundaries, yes, where the radiation levels in the sea just outside the plant are NOW thousands of times higher than they should be, radiation that will STAY there for 24,000 years… sounds a little like the Gulf of Mexico, yes? Of course, in that scenario, you don’t have radiation, but an oily mix of crude and corexit, five inches deep, covering thousands of square miles, creating giant dead zones that, you guessed it, kill all LIFE. In fact, the oil companies have won yet another battle on that one, even after a Norwegian company, and INDEPENDENT company, discovered that ALL of these safety “blowout preventers”, the cause of the Deep Water Horizon disaster a little under a year ago today, don’t really work. The study reflects the FACT that 50 percent of the time they fail, and, in yet another fun fact, even worse, they fail 100 percent of the time if the pressure is too high, pressure that they were designed to manage to begin with. Well, done bp, or “noble energy”, Shell Oil, Chevron, and a few others, you have a big green light to drill baby drill once again, deeper and more reckless this time, in the pristine and wonderful waters of the Gulf–home to the Brown Pelican, the sea turtle, the dolphin, the whale, and countless other species that make up the LIFE we all enjoy on this little blue rock called EARTH! I pray you all have a nice day and GOD’S continued speed to the good people of Japan–for if their ‘leaders’ continue to LIE to them, about the danger of what they are facing, WE will not forget, or fail to report it. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 30, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Wednesday morning here in Osterville, the tiny, tiny seaside village on Cape Cod proper, only a mere football toss away from the home to the late, great thirty-fifth President of the United States of America, Jack Kennedy, his beautiful wife, Jackie and his brothers Teddy and Bobby, not to mention his sisters, such as Eunice, and his mother and father, Rose and Joe Senior. I wonder what their thoughts would be regarding what I am about to write on this tiny, tiny blog on the website, seacapecod.net… The “Mackinac Center”, a conservative ‘think’ tank is demanding private emails on anyone who may be an expert on the right wing, little covered, COUP, of our country, the same group who pulls the strings on their elected puppets in, especially the House of Representatives, just about every state in the union now, all while they promote the LIE of their number one sales pitch to said, ad nauseum, “the American people”, and that, of course, being ‘we believe in a small government’, except of course, if you are poor, disenfranchised, a minority, a woman, a ‘gay’, or one of those liberal communist tree huggin’ pinko’s who don’t believe in the shot heard ’round the world’, as expressed by head crazy Michelle Bachmann recently in the great state of New Hampshire, where she concluded that New Hampshire was not only the place where that famous shot was fired, but also contained the towns of Concord and Lexington, which are, of course, right here in my backyard of Massachusetts. Bring it on a$$holes! Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, Rick Scott, Governor of Florida, John Kasich, Governor of Ohio, and Rick Snyder, Governor of Michigan, all embody the same wave of fascism emanating from the perilously close, and very real, takeover of our liberties in this great nation founded on the principal of “WE THE PEOPLE”, opting instead for, “WE THE CORPORATIONS”… Rick Snyder will be in today’s SPOTLIGHT, for his moves have prompted a tremendous outcry from that great state of Michigan, a state I once lived in, as his authoritarian rule over his constituents now includes the power to dissolve a whole town if it is deemed to be insolvent. However, what is even more disturbing is the fact that the “Mackinac Center” has now begun targeting professors at prestigious universities such as the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, professors such as William Cronon–a history professor, who is the President of the American historical association, a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, and considered to be one of the most distinguished professors of history in the United States today–and, more specifically, go after his emails. These emails have been ‘demanded’ by the Mackinac think tank, a, dare I say, Nazi organization, who are hell bent on propelling this nation backwards to the early 19th century. These emails were demanded by this well funded group, more about that later, after he wrote an academic piece about conservative groups using model legislation to push conservative policies in the states. The republican party in the state of Wisconsin filed an ‘open records request’ demanding to read professor Cronan’s emails–can you say, “1984?”, can you say George Orwell?, ’sure, I knew that you could…’ (credit the late, great Fred Rogers of PBS). Here is a prominent professor of HISTORY being scrutinized by billionaires hiding behind a fake ‘think tank’ that is nothing more than a strong arm for the agenda of the coming PLUTOCRACY, whose academic writings put him on the wrong side of the ‘republican’ party, or rather, the insane creation of the ‘tea party’ which is nothing more than a rag tag group of muscle men who were launched into office on the wings of billionaire’ dollars who now own them, lock, stock and barrel, demanding, as in the possible government shut down on April 8th, (if the billionaires don’t get their way in cutting 61 billion dollars from the federal budget, not in the way of a fair tax code, but rather in cutting spending on things like the EPA, ‘meals on wheels’, for seniors, home heating for those same seniors and the poor, Planned Parenthood, but, of course, never touching defense or the tax rate for said billionaires) that they, these teabaggers, do exactly what they wish to be done, i.e. busting unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, not to mention just about every other state in the union, taking away the last voice the collective ‘American people’ have in fighting this coup of our country by rich, white men who care nothing for the poor, the Constitution, the environment or the elderly–effectively saying to anyone out there, not unlike myself, “you speak out, the government will use all of the leverage it can muster to pry open your life…” A quote by my FRIEND Rachel Maddow. I say, bring it on! I have nothing to hide Mr. Koch, do you? The republicans, who double speak, incessantly, of a ’smaller, less intrusive government’ are out and out LIARS! These newly elected puppets of big business are nothing more than used car dealers who bait the ‘American people’ into believing they are really all about ‘individual liberty’ and ‘freedom’, when in actuality they are all about controlling the minds and purse strings of every American who may try and bring the real TRUTH into the equation, exposing what these people really are, newly elected puppets, calling themselves ‘republican governors’ and ‘members of the House of Representatives’–again, puppets on a string that can dance and sing with the best of them, puppets on a string who do the bidding of the big multinational corporations out there, whose interests have nothing to do with black people, Hispanic people, poor people, the elderly, our children’s education, or the environment…in short, have nothing to do with anything the United States of America stands for, or has stood for in it’s 236 year old history. When the pendulum began to swing back to the republican party after the democratic takeover in 2006 and 2008 national elections, again, favoring the democrats, it swung back to a particular kind of ‘conservatism’, an “authoritarian conservatism, or as Rachel Maddow put it, ‘really, really big intrusive government’–the polar opposite of their transparent hypocritical sales pitch to the “American People”, stating, congressman by congressman, Senator by Senator, they were all interested in a government that did not impede on everyday people’s lives, ’saying’ this, all while they launched a war against a woman’s right to choose, gay rights, minority rights, union rights, and well, any rights that they could wage a war on that did not involve the top one percent, whom they all work for. The first state wide elections after the democratic win in 2008, taking back the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, was Virginia and it’s governors’ race, in November of 2009. Virginia elected a man, Bob Macdonald, who said “…every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitors, homosexuals or fornicators.” Well done, Bob! You sir were the first to take that jump off the crazy cliff that you can never take back, you were the first to promote what all the other aforementioned governors, newly elected, in this fake tea party movement, are doing right now–you were the first to promote the ‘really, really big intrusive government’ culture war that is now being waged against women, minorities, gays, and the poor, working and indigent, along with the unions that gave us the week end, vacation, safe working conditions, and a voice in the American political system, or anyone who does not embrace the dangerous conservative christian coalition narrow mindset of what they ‘think’ America should be–a country specifically designed for billionaires to continue to rape and pillage, while holding the proverbial public’s head under water demanding an answer to the question posed in the classic film, “The Running Man”, starring Dustin Hoffman, “is it safe?” Macdonald going on demanding the emails from a Virginia science professor whose whole work on GLOBAL WARMING did not jive with the likes of a$$holes like David and Charles Koch, yes, Rachel, to use your words, “I can just smell the freedom…” ‘Talking Points Memo’ produced, recently, a new demand by the conservative movement whose headline reads, “Conservative think tank seeks Michigan professors emails about Wisconsin union battle and Maddow…” Huh? This is a new demand from the right, to DEMAND PRIVATE EMAILS of people to whom are calling out the conservatives on their lie that they ‘really just want small government, to leave people alone…’ What a crock of $hit. The Labor Studies faculty at Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and the University of Michigan, have all just had this DEMAND of surrendering their emails, by this right wing ‘think tank’, specifically demanding to see any email that includes, (but not limited to) the words, “Scott Walker”, “Wisconsin”, “Madison”, or “Maddow”. This is, again, the Mackinac Center, a well funded, by the likes of the ‘brother’s koch’, among other billionaires, think tank, secret in nature, as they don’t disclose their funder’s. However, Mother Jones Magazine came up with a list of those donors that include, but are not limited to, “Charles G. Koch Foundation” (polluting ‘frackers’), “the Walton Family” (the founders of Walmart and a recipient of a hopeful class action law suit brought against them, discrimination, by thousands of women employees of said company, going all the way to the Supreme Court) and Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation (parent’s to Eric Prince, the founder of the fine security firm called Blackwater, now known by it’s more feminine name, Xe), nice company eh? So here it is, the Mackinac Center, or group of billionaires hell bent on hijacking this country and it’s core principals, who represent nothing more than the beginning of the end of true liberty, freedom of thought, and the right to pursue any kind of happiness in the United States of America, “no fun of any kind!”–this group represents everything OUR forefathers fought and died for in 1776, fighting against what we are up against today, a really, really BIG tyrannical RULE of one King George the third, coming now in the form of the BROTHERS KOCH. Good Luck with that one, Mackinac Group, we here at SEACAPECOD.NET will be happy to comply with your orders, just as soon as you take off those stuffed white shirts and reveal the Nazi uniform underneath. BRING IT ON! The republican party’s bull$hit about small government is being exposed by excellent reporters and great citizens of this great country, people like Rachel Maddow, and it WILL continue–for your oligarchical days are numbered, trust me. We have seen worse villains than you, and there is such a thing that will never die, and that is SOCIAL JUSTICE!God’s continued speed to the good people of Japan, may we learn from your tragedy here in this backwater, at the moment, called the United States of America. Have a great day folks! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 29, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this twenty-ninth day of March, 2011, a beautiful day here in the Northeast, especially on Cape and the Islands, although still quite cold, it gives us pause to remember the promise of flowers to come in the near future. President Barrack Obama gave a speech to the nation and world last night regarding our efforts in the northern African nation of Libya, in specific terms, the United Nation’s Resolution “1973″, where we, along with 21 other countries, made a decision to stop the bloodshed that has been occurring in that country for the past few months. Many on the ‘right’ in this nation, have done their fair share of back flips, flip flops, or displayed blatant hypocrisy when reaching their seemingly unilateral position that, ‘whatever Obama does, says, thinks or attempts to act upon, is automatically, by definition, the polar opposite of our republican ‘values’, and therefore our basic platform, as a people that were actually ‘born in the U.S.A.’ President Obama should be proud for his efforts to actually DO what America once did around the world, i.e. World War II, and that, being, stemming violence and oppression wherever it may be possible and, moreover, plausible, for Libya is not, thank GOD, Iraq. Obama was not the President during the atrocities of Sudan, Darfur, Rwanda, the Congo, or many other nations that felt the sting of the international problem of human rights, let alone human decency. “WE”, collectively, as a now GLOBAL community, believe, en masse, that war and bloodshed, in any shade of gray, is not only ‘anti-american’, but wrong, with a capital “W”–wrong, wrong, wrong. Obama’s INTENTIONS, his actions and the fulfillment of his pledge to the world at large has been met, and if anyone disagrees with this TRUTH of someone brave enough to stand up for the values of a toddler nation only 236 years old such as the United States of America, stand now, offer a different solution, or simply hold your PEACE… Disclaimer: This does not include members of FOX NEWS, Rush Limbaugh, ‘commentators’ Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly, not to mention the likes of a “She turned me into a Newt”, Gingrich, whose marital hypocrisies are now battling for control of the that top prize behind his recent flip flop on this Libyan issue, as he went from two weeks ago saying, “I would put a no-fly zone in Libya tonight,” to “I would not have intervened.” Can someone say schizophrenia or at least adulterating scumbag? (”Sure, I knew that you could…” credit the late, great Fred Rogers of PBS). For if it is truly PEACE that you all wish for, let us ALL, collectively, rich or poor, look into our OWN hearts and see what is truly RIGHT and what is wrong. Anything less would render one a spineless jellyfish. As Ed Shultz, of the “ED SHOW”, only on MSNBC, airing every week night at 10 p.m., save Fridays, whom I will be quoting later in this “blog”, stated, “I think the President hit it out of the park.” Regarding last night’s speech of course. In LIGHT of what transpired in Egypt and Tunisia, or rather Tunisia and Egypt, Obama, as well as our allies in both the Middle East and Europe, realized that a brutal genocide in a country in between the two, would be a DE-stabilizing force in the real north star of our human hopes and aspirations, a North star towards the profound human need for FREEDOM and DIGNITY. These values, of course, are not shared by all, even in this country, as we watch in horror, billionaires David and Charles Koch, collectively the third richest men in America, coming in at 21 billion dollars of net worth apiece, continue to systematically destroy our lands via their extraction, for profit, of everything from natural gas, in the form of ‘fracking’, pouring 596 deadly chemicals into the earth to extract said gas from shale rock below the earth’s surface, to oil exploration in our most pristine wildlife refuge in the world, ‘the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’, or ANWR. Robert Greenwald, an independent film maker, has put together a ‘must see tv’ documentary on these charlatans who are not only hijacking our political system for their, and their limited friends, egoic gain, but for their OWN bottom line, caring not for the people, the ‘little people’, as the Chairman of bp once said about the poor fisherman of Louisiana after the Deep Water Horizon disaster only a little less than a year ago, turning this country against itself, all while they take record profits back to THEIR bank and laugh at the likes of good journalists such as Rachel Maddow and Ed Shultz, not to mention my friend Keith Olbermann who was run out of the business by ‘comcast’ and his very excellent replacement, Lawrence O’Donnell. The name of this documentary is “Kochbrothersexposed.com”. Remember that KOCH Industries is one of the two top privately held corporations in the country, and make no mistake, these are the people responsible for most, if not all, of the hateful, misleading ads you will see in the coming months and years. The republican magazine, “The Weekly Standard”, says their, the Koch brother’s, feelings were hurt, (I thought you had to have a heart to have your feelings hurt?) because people, like myself and others, a FACT, I will admit with GLEE, have actually called attention to another FACT they actually bank rolled the ‘tea party’ movement, a FAKE grass roots, corporate sponsored coup of the IDEALS targeting the TRUE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY we all currently live in–a group that has sponsored in a back stabbing kind of way the opposition to health care reform and the strong opposition to anti-pollution measures that are the culprit of our ever growing problem of GLOBAL WARMING. As ED put it, “thin skinned billionaires, I’d say, huh?” Thin skinned and sensitive enough to learn that two months ago, they hired Michael Goldfarb, contributing editor to the republican leaning “Weekly Standard”, to help defend them against the claim that they used the money to help themselves and their push towards a plutocracy that will destroy the ideals of what our forefathers created, divinely inspired I might add, called the Democracy of the United States of America, created by the silly notion of “WE THE PEOPLE”... The “Weekly Standard” is owned and operated, much like FOX NEWS’ Rupert Murdoch’s fake news show, by a right wing dear friend of the Koch brothers, Phillip Anschutz, and thus, came to the rescue of the much maligned billionaire brothers, depicting them on their most recent edition as VICTIMS of a witch hunt, looking as if they were about to be burned at the stake, “making” us all feel sorry for them, (can someone say, “Stockholm Syndrome”, again, I’m sure that you can) as another benefactor of the brother’s Koch wrote up a cover story about them, a cover story by Mathew Continetti, a kind of “wanna be Frank Luntz” (who the hell would wish for that?). Like Goldfarb, he is a post recipient of the fellowship funded, in part, by the brother’s Koch. Nice fraternity indeed ED! Here is some of the SELF PITY he passes on… Do you recall the fake phone call from presumably David Koch, a tremendous piece of work that even 60 Minutes could not emulate, exposing the vile Governor of Wisconsin for what he truly IS, a puppet for the “agenda” of the Plutocracy, no matter how much it hurts this nation as a whole, do your recall that conversation? David Koch, in his ‘victim mode’, cries “identity theft”, then goes on to say that the press, guilty as charged, attacked him, instead of the prankster, huh?, when the fact of the matter is the press went after the right guy–the Governor of Wisconsin who illegally stripped public employees of their god given right to collectively bargain for fair wages, safe working conditions and a voice in the national elections that determine our future as a country. It goes on to say just how badly President Obama has ‘hurt’ them, “…the President has done more damage to the “free enterprise” system and long term prosperity than any President we have ever had.” Good old David Koch, what a great man, a man worth over 21 billion dollars whining about the FACT this President has overseen a 50 percent leap in the stock market since taking office, along with record profits by “American” corporations. This all begs the question, WHO is the real enemy of the United States of America? Some foreign dictator or some insane sociopathic billionaire? Documentary film maker extraordinaire Robert Greenwald, take it away! AND ACTION! “The name of the upcoming documentary is called kochbrothersexposed.com, a series of web videos, launching tomorrow at that same sight, and thank you for having me on the program. We have seen so much ED, we have been on this for about four months now, as our researchers have been busy uncovering FACT after FACT, campaign after campaign, much of it ‘asto-turf’, as we uncover much of what they have really been doing. But the numbers, Ed, they are extraordinary, as it is truly hundreds of millions of dollars that are being funded and being used every step of the way. So, from the WAY that they fund, they are actually very smart–they fund ideas, they fund activists, they fund people to go on television, and they fund politicians, (can you say puppet??)–it’s a full and complete chain.” As ED asked the question of why so thin skinned?, wondering whether or not they have some emotional stake in all of this, Greenwald responds–”Very much so, in fact, my daughters came up with a great word, “A Pity Party” (again, see the definition of Stockholm Syndrome), and that seems to be what’s going on with them right now, you would think because they are truly affecting hundreds of millions of people’s lives, ED, the number of issues that they take on, everything from union busting, to climate change, to unemployment insurance, to student loans, you would think that people who were so dedicated and so hostile to so many of the positive AMERICAN VALUES would be ready for this kind of attack and blow back, which has been a long time coming. We owe a huge debt to people like Lee Fang and “alternet.org”, (among others Greenwald mentioned) who have been researching this, and what we’re going to do with our KOCH BROTHERS expose campaign, to show all of this–issue by issue, video after video.” In the immortal words of Charles Osgood of CBS‘, “Sunday Morning”, “we’ll be watching!” Thank GOD for that work and I would highly recommend it to anyone who might have a relative suffering from republican reptilian syndrome, of course, no offense to any reptiles, real reptiles anywhere in the world, especially that Egyptian Cobra that is loose somewhere in New York City, I believe… GOD’S continued speed to the good people of Japan, may your days of comfort and JOY return to you again soon. Have a pleasant day folks and please, for GOD’S sakes and yours, don’t take any wooden nickels, or any candy for that matter, from “men” posing as journalists on the likes of FOX NEWS, it can only end badly. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 28, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! So good to be with you on this beautifully cold Monday morning, the twenty-eighth day of March, 2011, and I say ‘beautifully cold’ because before too long, we, along with the rest of the world, will be longing for the cool days and nights of winter, as the spring and summer begin in earnest–bringing with it temperatures reaching their highest recorded levels in history, once again, since modern weather record keeping began in the late nineteenth century. The past ten years have been the hottest recorded on that historical fact sheet of numbers that don’t LIE, and as nothing has been done to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide into the air, via the electricity generated by coal fired plants, the cars and planes we fly fueled by oil, along with the countless ways we manufacture plastic products that utilize fossil fuel for their existence, we can expect to have yet another hot summer, so hot that we will long for the snows and even the ‘wicked’ cold winds that chill us to the very bone. Libyan rebels have retaken, or are in the process of retaking Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte, a hundred or miles or so east from the capital city of Tripoli, where the coalition forces, most believe still headed by the United States of America, along with our partner NATO (north Atlantic treaty organization), have continued to bomb pro-Gaddafi forces hoping to end this before it becomes yet another snafu in yet another Arab state, pushing the already war weary residents of this country into thinking, “what are we doing?” Recent reports by Rolling Stone magazine, embedded within Afghanistan, have revealed some brutal stories from the front lines in that ten year old war, where one rogue platoon has decided to take matters into their own hands, allegedly killing innocent civilians and displaying their bodies for all the world to see. A horrible example of combat fatigue or perhaps something even worse, as the morale in some of these units has hit an all time low. The ‘mission’ does not seem to have the definition of the word attached to it any longer, for perhaps it never did have a ‘mission’ to begin with, save the ‘Wanted–Osama Bin Laden…dead or alive!’ war drum that was pounded into our collective heads after 9/11. With that war cry being dead and gone, it is hard to see why we are still there, as our soldiers come ‘home’ to their country of origin beaten and bruised, mostly from the neck up, badly in need of psychological TLC. Their fight continues to rage in their own head, as I have written about extensively in my upcoming novel, “Taking Fog to Nantucket”, coming out in May or June of this year. War is not good for children, or any living thing. It is the antithesis of why we are really all here on this little blue rock I call earth–and that reason is to learn what we already learned to begin with, but forgot–“Love one another, for by loving another, you are indeed loving yourself.” (and that, by the way, is the BEST way to love god, if you believe in that sort of thing, and it is fine if you don’t, for he believes in you). The whole of the Middle East is at the point of breaking, as we see extensive uprisings in Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. The fear that the administration has, along with anyone who is not a five year old intent on acting like one, is that al Qaida will infiltrate one of these countries, possibly Yemen, and ‘launch’ it’s extremists hate filled death threats to the West and it’s allies from there. However, we must not believe that we can stop all of this simply by bombing or by boots on the ground. If this latest atrocity in Afghanistan tells us anything, it is this–our soldiers are being pushed to the point where the body, mind and soul cannot take anymore, and when those soldiers come home, they should be given every care under the sun to become WHOLE again, for many are not whole now, as they live their lives homeless in the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, New York, or Houston. Their lives have become skewed, as many live in a constant state of fear and feel hyper-sensitive to everything around them, on ‘guard’ 24/7/365, with a fear so profound, they are blinded to the LOVE and beauty all around them. That is what we have stolen from them, and it is high time the United States military take steps to help these soldiers who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, an invisible disease that takes one to the deepest depths of hell, not even a battle field could compete with. In fact, that is what many of these soldiers wish for, the fight, for that is the only place they feel normal, feel ‘themselves’. God willing, someone in the upper echelons of the military brass will be reading this commentary today.

On a lighter note, the “National Cherry Blossom Festival” kicked off on Saturday in Washington D.C., with over 4000 Japanese cherry trees lining the National Mall expected to peak on Tuesday, although with the cool weather recently, their ‘peak’ may come a little later on. The Japanese government donated these same type of Japanese cherry trees, at the behest of Washington socialite Eliza Skidmore, gee, I hope I got the spelling right on that one, in the late 1800’s, but the project only took off with the support of First Lady Helen Taft. The city of Tokyo donated 2000 trees, but after their arrival, were found to have been infected with insects, and thus, had to be burned. Japan provided replacement trees, and the first two were planted on March 27th, 1912. Exactly 99 years ago, give or take a day or so. The first Cherry Blossom Festival was held in 1935 and, in 1994, was extended from one week to two. This year’s festival began this past Saturday and is expected to go until April 12th. In a gesture of support for the nation that made it all possible, organizers are encouraging visitors to donate to a Red Cross relief fund for the people of Japan (you can as well, by texting REDCROSS to 90999, which will automatically donate $10 for you) who were devastated by the March 11, 2011 9.0 earthquake and subsequent killer tsunami that shattered so many lives to the north of Japan’s largest city Tokyo. Those are the people that really need help, not only money, but your prayers as well. GOD’s SPEED to them all! And finally today, I would like to dedicate this “blog” entry to two women who changed the face of this world for the better, as we lost them both in this past week. The first was Elizabeth Taylor, the great actress, humanitarian and real soul, who starred in over 50 motion picture films, countless television appearances, not to mention many appearances on the Broadway stage. She won 2 Oscars, handed out by the prestigious Academy Awards committee in Los Angeles, for her work in “Butterfield 8” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But, perhaps her greatest achievement was, when it was not in vogue or part of the most popular ‘thing’ in the public eye, her dedication and work regarding the devastating A.I.D.S. virus and subsequent epidemic that began sweeping the United States and the world in the early to mid 1980’s. Her work with other great artists like Michael Jackson, brought that dark disease into the LIGHT of day, therein, most likely speeding up awareness and the search for a cure, as it did most certainly improve the then current treatments of that horrible ailment, making AIDS a household name, and perhaps taking away the fear of it, exposing myths and replacing them with facts–such as you cannot ‘get’ AIDS from a person by touching them on the shoulder. We owe you a debt of gratitude from your first film, created in 1944, “National Velvet”, where you played a violet eyed young girl who displayed a giant LOVE for her horse and LIFE in general, to your final days where you continued to give whatever your voice could lend to the causes of making this world a little better place to live in. GOD’S SPEED Elizabeth! The second woman I would like to dedicate this Monday morning to is Geraldine Ferraro, who passed away on Saturday in Boston. She was a true pioneer for women in this country, in gaining a foothold in the male dominated political landscape that exists in America even to this day. Her 1984 Vice Presidential bid, on the same ticket as Presidential hopeful Walter Mondale in that same year of 1984, propelled her into the spotlight, a white hot spotlight I might add, putting forth an agenda that exposed the double standard that still exists in our society when it comes to womens’ rights. The new law suit against Walmart, going all the way to the Supreme Court, where women are demanding equal pay for equal work, is an example of her voice in there somewhere, while it also exemplifies just how far this country still needs to go when it comes to equal treatment of women not only in the workplace, but the way in which we treat women in general. She will be missed. GOD’s speed to you as well Geraldine, you were a fighter and a great example of what a “politician” should be all about. May GOD’S continued grace be upon the good people of Japan, especially those in the northeastern fishing villages, all 600 kilometer’s worth, whose homes are GONE as they sit in the snowy fields of waste and debris, searching for firewood to keep warm, melting snow for drinking water, and hoping that Help will be at their doorstep soon. Have a wonderful week folks and may GOD be with you and yours as well. This world does not have to be the way it is, there is still “time” to heal it. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 27, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this Sunday morning, the twenty seventh day of March, 2011, coming to you LIVE from the shores of Osterville, that tiny, tiny seaside village a football toss from Hyannis Port and home to the late, great thirty fifth President of the United States, Jack Kennedy and his beautiful wife Jackie. Above you is an image I experienced recently and saved for posterity from a few days ago, a view from Orleans, another ’small seaside village’ that makes this little sand bar created by the Last Great Ice Age 11,500 years ago what it is today–an amazing throwback to what ‘AMERICA’ once was, and can be again… Well, as always, I will be immersed in the ‘Sunday morning talk shows’, notably ABC’s, “this week, with Christiane Amanpour”, and NBC’s“Meet the Press, with David Gregory”. I do not have the stomach or the time to watch FOX NEWS’ equivalent of such fine broadcasts, mostly because FOX NEWS is NOT an equivalent of either, for we all know, or we all should know, that FOX NEWS is simply a propaganda arm for the multinational corporations to spin their yards of lies and innuendo that only serve to muddy the waters of TRUTH and JUSTICE for the average ‘American people’ out there who, some at least, know no better. I say this not as a slight to the very slick business model FOX has created, but to WAKE people up to the fact that they are constantly being duped by magicians wearing ‘journalist’ garb. What makes the ‘Sunday talk shows’ so fun and full of imagination is watching the pundits and politicians scrap and fight over their ‘positions’, as we are never quite aware of where those ‘positions’ come home to roost. In other words, it is a game to uncover who they are really working for, as it is clearly not the ‘American People’, a phrase that we hear so often from our friendly puppets on the ‘right’ side of the aisle. Japan is still reeling from the devastating earthquake and tsunami that took place a little over two weeks ago, with hundreds of thousands of poor souls on the northeastern quadrant of that isolated island nation, lacking the basic needs of sustaining LIFE, i.e. clean water, food and shelter. To the south, the Fukushima nuclear power plant may be in worse shape than previously thought as it is hard to get a straight answer from Japan’s corporate overlords who apparently are running the cleanup effort that entails cooling down the ’spent’ fuel rods that have been in danger of melting down completely, causing even more deadly radiation to escape into the atmosphere, resulting in long term health issues for a people who ask no questions, offer no complaints, and stoically go about their lives as they rebuild a country that to the north and east, looks like it has been rocked by Tomahawk missiles. GOD’S continued speed to those very good and gracious people of Japan. We, at least here on Cape Cod and the Islands, will continue to keep you in our prayers. Speaking of Tomahawk missiles, the ‘new war’ that the United States has found itself in, a N.A.T.O. ‘effort’ now, according to U.S. officials, a war with another Arab nation is in full swing. This time in northern Africa–Libya, confronting the brutal terrorist dictator Moammar Gaddafi. This, as we continue to see equally disturbing images from other Arab nations in the Middle East, such as the protests and subsequent killings of innocent citizens in once stable countries such as Syria and Jordan, as well as the continued brutality in Yemen and Bahrain. It is hard to imagine that an already stretched U.S. military can do much about this wave of revolution that now fills the airwaves, bringing insecurity to our very doorstep. It is a frightening prospect to say the least. We talk of peace so often, yet it seems to be the most elusive value we, as humans, wish to embrace and hold as dear as GOLD. My sincerest prayers go out to those brothers and sisters in those war torn regions of this world we all share and cherish, hoping against hope that creative compassionate intelligence will carry US all out of this insane conundrum of multinational corporate interests eternally butting heads with the very real needs of ALL the people’s of the world, for one cannot have ‘globalization’ without a simultaneous compassion for ALL those people who make up the reality of GLOBALIZATION. Ellen Page, a fine actress and activist, appeared on Bill Maher’s most excellent show on HBO, ‘Real Time, with Bill Maher’, and spoke to the very real problem of global hunger, stemming from OUR equally very real problem of mankind’s activity on planet earth. Not only are the polar ice caps melting at an exponentially fast pace now, with the north pole almost half gone, a FACT that cannot be disputed unless you don’t believe in satellite images, which would mean, of course, that you DO believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and the concept of ‘compassionate conservatism’, but the bees are disappearing from our planet at an even faster pace than the melting of the glaciers and the rising water levels of our oceans. Bees, in their simplicity and work ethic, are responsible for our food, GLOBALLY, as they pollinate the flowers that eventually become fruit or vegetables of some kind or another. The integrity of our soil, not only here in the United States, but everywhere now, adds to this dilemma, as well as the massive amounts of pesticides used to ‘kill’ pests brought on by industrialized farming techniques–pesticides that may also be the culprit behind the disappearance of the bees. Einstein once said that when the bees go, when they become as extinct as the Dodo bird, or the Brontosaurus, human beings will only have about four years left. Einstein, Albert, was considered, along with Sir Isaac Newton, to be our, as a world society, foremost scientist, who also had a strong FAITH in a power greater than ‘mankind’. His theory of relativity, E=MC squared, is widely known as the pioneering breakthrough for all sorts of scientific discoveries, bringing all of this technology and ‘intelligence’ home for many of us. However, if Einstein were alive today, his thoughts would not be on creating a better mouse trap for GE, not my parent company here at seacapecod.net, as it is for my friends at NBC, a corporation that paid nothing, by the way, in fact received a return, paid nothing, along with the likes of Exxon Mobile, in federal corporate incomes taxes in 2010, a story for another day, yes, if Albert Einstein were alive today, his thoughts would be centered on finding out what is killing the most important aspect of our food growing potential and what we can do to stop this very frightening disappearance of our little black and yellow friends–the bees. The good folks over at FOX NEWS would rather you concentrate on something else, such as the advertisements, rather than bother yourself with a problem that could result in world wide famine, making the earthquake in Japan pale in comparison. There is so little coverage of this and my great fear is that when we finally do wake up, collectively as a species, it will be too late for the majority of the world’s population, as the world becomes hotter and more dangerous, all while the ‘man behind the curtain’, just as in the film ‘The Wizard of Oz’, screams and yells at his trembling audience stating, “there is nothing to see here folks, just go about you business and leave the grownup problems to the ‘adults’. The basic formula is to keep the masses happy, full and drunk on carnivals and other distractions, as the multinational corporate conglomerates continue to destroy MOTHER EARTH, one coal infested smoke stack at a time. I will have much more on this ‘bee’ issue in the weeks ahead, but rest assured of one thing, I am not a just another crazy, tree huggin’ liberal hell bent on ’scaring the straights’. (credit Bill Murray in the classic film, Ghostbusters!) No, I am a former corporate insurance executive who finally found his voice, or should I say, found it once again, as I must have lost it in England during my freshman year of college. I have no “Angle” here and thus, only hope that someone out there receives this message in a bottle and we all collectively do something about our environment before it is too late. As Ellen said, this is not about our children or our grandchildren, the republicans so often falsely speak to, no, this is happening RIGHT NOW, and must be addressed or we won’t have any grand kids to learn years later, were quite upset with our reckless ways in the twentieth and early twenty first centuries, allowing greedy corporations to rule the earth, to the demise of 99 percent of it’s people. Eventually something has got to give. Have a wonderful Sunday folks and don’t take any wooden nickles, your life and those you care about might just depend on it! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 26, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Saturday morning, the twenty sixth day of March, 2011, coming to you LIVE from the shores of Osterville, the little seaside village a football toss from Hyannis Port, former home to the late, great thirty fifth President of the United States, Jack Kennedy, and his beautiful wife Jackie. Although the calendar says spring, the weather this morning would indicate that winter is still in charge, offering a cold start to the week end here in the mid Cape region. The two main stories that are haunting the 24/7 news cycle today still center on the unrest in the Middle East (Libya and Syria in particular) and the difficult job of containing the cracks, sending and spilling dangerous amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, in the reactors, that have sent three of the brave ‘Fukushima 50′, the firemen and other workers in Japan who are risking their own lives to somehow ‘fix’ damaged or completely broken reactors, to hospital–as they have been busy putting water on ’spent’ fuel rods that need to be kept cool in order to prevent more radiation escaping into the Japanese county side and beyond, an heroic effort to prevent more lives being lost. If you have a moment today, please consider a prayer for these good and resilient brothers and sisters of ours in that island nation, for their plight could well be ours if our own ‘nuclear regulatory commission’ does not get it’s act together, namely by acting like a regulatory commission instead of a two dollar hooker–truly inspecting the 104 plants in this country that are all coming up for their license renewals, renewing many plants that are badly in need of repairs and updates, as many sit on active fault lines, not to mention many more that have already gone way past their INTENDED life span as a nuclear facility, while the ‘NRC’ offers ‘power up grades’…pure insanity. It is shameful and a disgrace that any politician would use the people of this country as political footballs, when there is so much at stake here. Add to that regulatory nightmare, the independent study that recently came out regarding the ‘autopsy’ of the ‘blowout preventer’, the chief cause for the Deep Water Horizon disaster with bp’s name on it in the Gulf of Mexico eleven and a half months ago. According to a Norwegian firm, the blowout preventer IS the culprit, as test after exhaustive INDEPENDENT tests prove, 45 percent of the time these blowout ‘preventers’ of oil spills cannot stop the destructive pressure offered in the very dangerous game of deep water oil drilling, a sport that the federal government, namely the Department of Interior, has stepped up a notch, recently granting five more permits to drill in even deeper water, such as the recent Chevron pass, to drill in 7000 feet in the Gulf of Mexico–2000 more feet than the ‘deep water horizon’. According to Bob Cavnar, an ex-oil guy, the same safety procedures that were set to stone in the form of a ‘plan’ in 2009, the ‘emergency response plane’, are still in place, it’s the same plan, with the same ’safety’ measures, offering no concrete changes. Therefore, we are playing russian roulette with this nonsensical drilling in waters where we should be more concerned about the fact that hundred mile long plumes of ’sheen’ are re-appearing off the coast of Louisiana, marking the FACT that because of that disastrous oil spill in 2010, the ocean now has giant ‘dead zones’ where the basic building blocks of our food chain cannot live, because the oil and Corexit dispersant have effectively coated hundreds of square miles, at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, with a gooey mixture, an oil/corexit mixture, highly toxic, 5 inches deep, cutting off oxygen and, thus, vital nutrition for said one cell animals that fish and other animals up the food chain eat, going all the way, you guessed it, up to man himself, man who now wants to continue to drill with equipment that has now been proved will not work if pressure gets out of control, which always will in this deep water exercise of profit and greed–profit and greed to the detriment of our planet, it’s people and it’s animal and plant kingdoms–a real lose-lose for us all. Sweet dreams Tony, ‘gone sailin’” Hayward, former bp CEO!–you and your kind will be duly noted for all to see in the coming years. Have a wonderful day everybody and remember to tip you waitresses! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 25, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this twenty fifth day of March, 2011, my birthday, from the beautiful shores of the little, tiny, tiny seaside village of Osterville. A stunningly gorgeous day out here in the sand bar created by the Last Great Ice Age, and I wish you and yours a very fine and fair adieu. “Freedom Packages”, ala John Stewart’s, of “The Daily Show, with John Stewart”, only on Comedy Central, indentured servant, just kidding, the very funny, and quite British correspondent of said show, John Oliver, has provided a solution to the needs of say a Sudan, Egypt, or Libya, revealing that epic solution to the LIGHT. Bringing freedom to your doorstep in the Middle East for over 75 years now. Mr. Oliver, God Bless his English soul, brought forth, to wit, the concept of the “Platinum Package”, that, not unlike the illegal invasion and subsequent bloody war in Iraq, resulting in over 4400 American casualties, as well as over 70,000 Iraqi civilians, affords one the luxury of bathing in the false premise of “freeing” the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator who, regardless of what you may think of him, at least gave the citizens of Iraq a constant stream of electricity, yes, not unlike Iraq, brings the great people of Libya, the effervescent glow of Tomahawk missiles reigning down from the sky, adding a dose of gasoline to an already out of control fire, a fire that is way over the heads of a country that is having a hard time living up to it’s 236 year history of DEMOCRACY, as compared to the 5000 year old cradle of civilization, represented in the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers, Babylonia, that is in the same neighborhood of the Holy Land of Israel and the rock where Muhammad was purportedly raised into Heaven. Peace be upon his name. Here’s a thought about our retarded republican party, and I use that word in the literal sense of what the word means, not directed towards anyone with a mental challenge such as retardation. That word would not be strong enough for these republican puppets ‘gone wild’. The National Nuclear Safety Administration, or the NNSA, is, along with home heating oil assistance for the poor and elderly in this very RICH nation, on the chopping block in the never ending mission to eliminate ALL social programs in this country, because, “we’re broke”. Programs that were built years ago by men far greater than these CLOWNS, designed to HELP our citizens in their greatest time of need. This agency, paramount in keeping loose nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists, is up for recall, as it’s budget to collect and protect said nuclear materials has been slashed, promising to effectively take away their ability to prevent that, and I quote our former President George W. Bush, “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Well done, you Idiots! Retired Lt. General Robert Gard, placed an advertisement out targeting my pals and yours–Speaker of the House of Representatives, John, “billy bob”, Boehner, Senate minority ‘leader’ and head of the Mickey Mouse club, no offense to the late, great Walt Disney, Mitch, “the mouse”, McConnell (R-KY) along with Eric, “you go girl”, Cantor, House whip, congressional representative and aspiring Hitler youth, Paul Ryan, and two others–aimed at calling out these again, CLOWNS, cowardly clowns at that, on their short sighted stupidity in cutting a program of PARAMOUNT importance to our national security and the security of our friends all over the world. Just another example of this epic hijacking of America via the corporate overlords that are raping our environment for their short term profit models, while they continue to make the idea of ‘one man, one vote’, a literal joke, as the coming PLUTOCRACY takes whatever it wishes, while it takes a big dump on the, say it with me McConnell, you MOUSE!, “The American People”, the majority of 99 percent of said, real American people, whom you have no vested interest in and never, ever will. Take it away General! AND ACTION! “Speaker Boehner and the House Republicans cut hundreds of millions of dollars from a successful U.S. program to secure dangerous weapons-grade nuclear material all around the world. Terrorists can make nuclear weapons with it. John Boehner’s reckless cut to our nuclear security budget goes WAY too far. We want congress to cut the budget, but do so responsibly.“ Well, it being my birthday and all, that is really all I had to say today, other than to continue to wish the good people of Japan GOD’S SPEED, especially those poor fishermen and their families in the northwestern part of that island nation, where stunning images keep coming in from the BBC, as we witness first hand the few survivors attempting to keep warm as the snow continues to fly, while they sit and wait for help, surrounded by the complete and utter devastation wrought by the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011, only two weeks ago today. Have a wonderful day folks and even better week end. May the FORCE be with you! PRESERVETHE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 24, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be back with you on this snowy morning here on Cape Cod, Osterville to be precise, where we have received a few inches, thus far, of the white stuff, two days after the beginning of Spring. Good to be back on the mainland, after taking a much needed trip to Nantucket and a photo op, acquiring images on my Nikon D-200 camera, of that little rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, well, actually, roughly 30 miles south/southeast off Hyannis Harbor. Nantucket, in the winter, is a lonely place, where only 15,000 people live year round, as opposed to the over 150,000-200,000 who flock there during the more mild seasons of spring, summer and part of the fall. Nantucket’s brilliance though, shines during the winter months, as one can literally walk Surfside, or Madekat beaches, on the southern and western parts of the island, staring south towards Antarctica, for hours and not see another single living creature, save the many species of birds that soar in the ever changing winds, calling out there names as the waves crash against the rocks and sand of that great island. It has been quite a week in this world of ours has it not? The United States of America is now entrenched in another war involving yet another Arab country, four now if you consider the covert war no one really speaks of in Pakistan, where we continue, daily it seems, to drop ‘predator drones’ on ‘enemies’ that do not seem to have a clear definition, or a stated beef with our policies, making it even more unclear as to our ‘mission’ not only in that country, but in the ten year long war we have been stuck in right next door, in neighboring Afghanistan, a war we are spending 2 billion dollars a week on while we cut the budget back here in the United States on everything from the environment, to education, from home heating oil for the poor and the elderly, to programs for women in Planned Parenthood centers all across this country. Add all of that to this decision to invade Libya, for all intents and purposes, when special forces receive their orders to ‘assist’ rebel forces in bringing down yet another dictator who, although IS an international terrorist, does not necessarily afford the real commitment our blood and treasure brings to the table. When we look at the atrocities that have occurred in Darfur, Sudan, and Rwanda, where millions of people have been systematically wiped from the face of the earth, at the hands of other vicious genocidal maniacs, or the killings of peaceful protesters in Yemen, Bahrain, and even Syria recently, we have to ask ourselves, a) do we have the capital to continue being the world’s policemen?, and b) where do we draw the line with our spending on the ‘never ending war’, feeding the military industrial complex, that rewards large corporations around the world, when our bridges and roads are falling apart in this country, when our people are undernourished and in some cases starving to death, who are both undereducated and generally under-appreciated, as corporate mandates take center stage in every debate, winning out in the end because their lobbies, and their corporate owned, bully bullhorn airwaves such as FOX NEWS, are infinitely more powerful than this rag tag group of what has become the shadow of once was a strong, and proud middle class, ever increasingly becoming the working poor, in a land that was created under the guise of… “WE THE PEOPLE”, stating very clearly that this is a nation, “Of the people, By the people, and FOR THE PEOPLE.” Our priorities in this great nation are so far out of whack it is hard to imagine them getting back to the common sense ideas that were put forth over 236 years ago by our Founding Father’s such as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams, not to mention others like the great author/philosopher and deep thinker, Thomas Paine, ideas that were spelled out in a book by the same name–“Common Sense.” This, all happening at the same time the Japanese people were LIED to by their version of our Nuclear Regulatory Agency, as dangerous levels of radiation are now being found in everything from spinach to milk, adding more salt to a very deep and painful wound caused by the massive 9.0 quake and subsequent tsunami on March 11th, 2011. All of this and Donald Trump on ‘The View’?!– displaying, for all the world to see, his new “birther” position, climbing aboard that crazy train of yahoos who truly believe our President, Barrack Obama, was not actually born where his highly vetted, scrubbed, sterilized and disintfected birth certificate says he was–in the beautiful state of Hawaii. I’m not sure what was sadder to watch, Donald Trump’s appearance on Comedy Central’s recent ‘roast’ of him, or his appearances on ‘Morning Joe’, where the hosts lavished all kinds of sickening praise for a man who ‘fires’ people for a living. I fortunately, did not watch “The View” and thus was spared the arrogance and unattributable ‘greatness’ of a man who cares nothing for the poor, the sick or the elderly in this country–a country that he would like to head. “Your fired!” (in a faux tough guy New York accent)… God help us all. May the GRACE of GOD continue to be with the good men and women of the island nation of Japan, bringing some Light at the end of this very long and dark tunnel they have found themselves in. Have a wonderful day folks and may GOD’s grace also be with you and yours. PRESERVETHE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 20, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Monday morning, the twenty first day of March, 2011, the official first day of SPRING! and with a the dawning of a new day and a new week, I bid you and yours a fair and fine adieu. The U.S. and coalition force’s military strikes continue to pound Libya’s pro-Gaddafi forces in Tripoli with many questions left unanswered by many politicians, pundits, citizens from around the world and members of the Arab League, some of whom were not at all pleased by the reports of civilian casualties in that war battered country. I will be on assignment in the morning, so I thought I would get this ‘message in a bottle’ to you in the very early hours of the morning, as I will be on Nantucket all day for a photo op, perhaps taking some pictures of my old pals at the Nantucket Police Department, as my novel, “Taking Fog to Nantucket”, will be coming out sometime, touch wood, in May of this year. So have a wonderful week folks, don’t take any wooden nickels and GOD’S continued speed to the good people of Japan, who have been through more than any of us can imagine. Please say a prayer if you can for those poor souls who do not have more than a bowl of rice to eat tonight, let alone clean drinking water or a home at all. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Sunday morning, the twentieth day of March, 2011, a spectacular morning here on Cape Cod and the Islands, as we just enjoyed the brilliant star filled night coupled with the “super moon”, 14 percent larger in the sky, as the oval shaped pattern of the moon’s orbit around the earth came as close to our ‘home’ planet as it can, an occurrence that happens only once in a ‘blue moon’ (every eighteen years), especially when it coincides with a ‘full moon’, affecting everything from tides to people’s moods, creating spectacular images of the moon from all over the world, as we look forward to another Sunday morning here in the United States, a day spent, by yours truly, sifting through all of the ‘information’ served up by pundits and politicians alike, the best of which can be seen on NBC and ABC, “This Week, with Christiane Amanpour“, and “Meet the Press, with David Gregory”, not necessarily in that order. The United States of America is at war again with another Middle Eastern country as of 2 p.m., EDT, Saturday afternoon, yesterday, the 19th of March, 2011. With a coalition of 21 countries and the backing of a United Nations resolution, not to mention an endorsement from the Arab League itself, the United States launched 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. war ships and submarines from an estimated distance of 500 miles, somewhere out in the Mediterranean Sea. An early report this morning also confirmed that U.S. warplanes have entered the fray, with Stealth bombers, F-15, and F-16 fighter jets hitting ground troops and other targets, broadening the scope of this campaign, dubbed, “Odyssey Dawn”. Again, this all under the authority of the U.N. resolution adopted last week, with some nations in that body, such as China and Germany, abstaining, offering a ‘no vote’, or, in American Gallup poll terms, “I’m not sure”. This effort’s main goal is to stop Moammar Gaddafi from waging war against his own people, a vicious war at that, as thousands have already died as a result of this intense power struggle in the ever increasingly volatile Middle East. The establishment of a ‘no fly zone’ entails real military strikes, as evidenced by the past 32 hours, and as the coalition establishes not only air superiority, pounding some 20 targets thus far, taking out surface-to-air missile capability in Tripoli, as well as two cities to the east, Misrata and Sert, the French Air Force of at least 20 fighter jets struck at the rebel stronghold to the east, the city of Benghazi, hundreds of miles east of the capital city of Tripoli, hitting a pro-Libyan armored personnel truck, making this conflict very real indeed. Images emerging from the area, with a Libyan plane seen falling from the sky, brings all of this ‘home’ to Americans, with America, the United States of America, and it’s people, being a very war weary nation, seemingly being at war forever now in both Afghanistan and Iraq, 10 plus years now, and wondering out loud to themselves, hopefully, ‘what does this really mean for the United States?’, ‘how long is our commitment there, really?’, and, of course, the 64,000 dollar question, ‘why do we feel the need to stabilize a country like Libya, when far worse atrocities are, and have been, occurring just south of that country in neighboring Sudan, where genocide has been rampant for years now?’ What, too soon? Too soon to ask those vital questions? No pressure due to oil interests or ‘market stability’? Alas, I digress. According to reports from ABC NEWS last night, there will be no strikes east of Sert, where the rebels are said to be in ‘control’. This will be just the first phase of a multi-phase operation. U.S. General Carter Ham is in charge, with Admiral Sam Locklear coordinating the actual strikes. But once this initial phase is complete, Ham and Locklear, will pass authority over to a coalition partner, who will, ‘takeover’ from there. That’s the ‘plan’ anyway, sorry if I sound a little skeptical about the whole attacking a ’sovereign nation’ kind of thing, as it has gone so well in our glorious military past, at least since the days of the Vietnam War. The general stated in a press conference yesterday, “this is just the first phase in this operation … this multi-phase military operation … this is an international military effort … urged by the Libyan people themselves … and by other Arab nations …”, those being the salient points of his sales pitch. The next phase will be the ‘no fly zone’ which will be from Tripoli to Benghazi, involving hundreds of aircraft. U.S. F-16 fighter jets, as previously mentioned will take a part in this effort, perhaps our best fighter jet, but most of the fighters will be from Britain, France and other allied partners. The U.S. will provide support aircraft like air re-fuelers, communication aircraft and jammers, so Gaddafi’s troops cannot talk to one another. “This first phase is scheduled to last just few days and what the U.S. military is watching tonight is how the Gaddafi regime will react to those attacks, and what kind of a response that might require.” Thank you for that report from Martha Raddatz of ABC NEWS. It is true that the French and British have lead this attack on Gaddafi, a truly brutal terrorist dictator who is killing his own people, and thus, the U.S. was truly lead into this conflict, not a conflict it walked into lightly, as diplomatic efforts failed and with international war crimes being brought against Colonel Gaddafi, by the International Tribunal in the Netherlands, Den Hague, the real home of the United Nations, Gaddafi really doesn’t have anywhere to go. His rhetoric matches that reality. And you can couple that with the fact that with so much unrest going on in the Middle East in general, with populist pro-democratic uprisings in at least six Arab nations, some on a ‘cooler’ boil than others, President Barrack Obama had to eventually side with the people, as Gaddafi broke one promise of a ’sieze fire’ after another. One thing is for sure, regardless of what you personally may think about the Middle East, you would be wise to brush up on your history in the region, because if you think ‘March Madness’, the U.S. men’s college basketball tournament, that takes place in this country every March, with 64 teams competing for the national championship, is ‘crazy’ and unpredictable, then you will love the mini-wars, flareups and counterintelligence efforts, such as the ever growing problem with nuclear weapons being developed in Iran, that will continue for God knows how long in that volatile region of the world–proving it to be quite ‘madcap’, zany, kooky, and even a little, as evidenced by Gaddafi’s insane rambling speeches complete with a white umbrella, ‘nutty’ at times…so keep it tuned to MSNBC, ABC, NBC,CBS, PBS, or even, if desperate, CNN, but for God’s sakes, don’t tune into FOX NEWS, we have enough ‘insanity’ at the moment, thank you very much. Right Glenn? I keep waiting for Glenn Beck to just break down one day and start yelling, “we’re slashing prices at Beck University by thousands of dollars, everything must go, re-written American history books, ‘authored’ by the good folks at the Texas Board of Education, re-writing American history since the year of 2000 A.D., signed authentic gold coins from Gold Line, TM, yes, signed rare gold coins that are worth less than what you buy them for, signed, before he died, by Abraham Lincoln himself, God rest his soul, perfect for parties as a conversation piece, where you can say to your friends, ‘hey, look at this coin signed by Abraham Lincoln himself, isn’t that just crazy?’, so come on down, we’re slashing prices for admission to our worthless college, on par with Pat Robertson’s U, so low, it’s INSANE.” Something like that. My heart and prayers, however, as always, go out to the young men and women who put on the military uniform, who put themselves in harms way for our nation’s security, defending our country from enemies, both foreign and domestic, every day, never asking questions of the political nature while serving, who also protect the innocent victims of genocide and atrocities by brutal dictators around the world, like the current one in Libya, over the centuries, all afforded through the United States’ venerable armed traditions of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. May you all be safe wherever you are on this planet earth today, and always, and may someday, some way, there be no need for war of any kind, a world where our thirst for PEACE and LOVE for our fellow man outweigh our incessant seeming need for violence and conflict. GOD’S continued SPEED to the people of Japan. Have a wonderful day everyone and GOD BLESS us ALL. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 19, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Saturday morning, the nineteenth day of March, 2011, a beautiful one, as evidenced in the image of Hyannis Port above you, on this little sand bar created 11,500 years ago by the Last Great Ice Age. The weather on the Cape and Islands has a feel today of Spring, with temperatures expected in the low 50’s today, with abundant sunshine–can anyone say “sailing”? So come on down and visit US, we will leave the LIGHT on for you! A follow up from yesterday’s blog, same bat time, same bat channel, not to be confused, of course, with bat$hit stations like FOX NEWS, right here LIVE from Osterville, at seacapecod.net. Ed Schultz, a great reporter from the “ED SHOW” airing every week night at 10 p.m., only on MSNBC, had, as his guest, another expert on atomic energy, focusing on the United States, and one of the creators of riverkeeper.org, an excellent source of TRUTH in an otherwise mire of hor$e$hit that engulfs most of the airwaves now in the United States of America, who spoke to Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo’s three year position on the safety concerns over the “Indian Point” nuclear power plant, located only 30 miles from the heart of downtown New York City. Indian Point is ranked the most dangerous of the 104 nuclear power plants currently operating in the United States. It is ranked as such for two very important reasons, a) the age of the facility, as it is the oldest and most in need of immediate improvements or repairs!, and b) the fact that the plant lies on two, count them two, ACTIVE fault lines that experts at Columbia University say could easily produce a 7.0 quake that would spell disaster for the roughly 17 million people living in and around the New York City metropolitan area. This piles on the growing sentiment of experts from all areas that maintain many other plants in this nation have similar problems that have been ignored over the years and all adds up to the same song and dance of corporations, and their reason for existence, PROFIT, taking precedent over living, breathing, real life American citizens who blindly go about their day, no fault of their own, “thinking” nothing like what happened in Japan could ever happen right here in our own backyard, right here in the good ‘ole U.S. of A., ’cause we got the “NRC”, the nuclear regulatory commission, working on it 24/7, (until Americans forget about Japan and focus on something else) and those good folks over at the NRC could never be swayed by the powerful lobbyists that also work, much harder I might add, 24/7, for the various corporate interests who own said power plants, in it for the MONEY only, as evidenced by their shoddy and irresponsible stewardship of an energy source that we, as humans, have not really found a way to deliver without extreme risks to the public at large. A new Gallup poll recently came out reflecting the fact that 70 percent of Americans now are more concerned about nuclear accidents than they were only a week and a day ago, it’s just human nature, when you see what is going on half way around the world, and you know what officials must have told those poor Japanese people before March 11th, “don’t worry, focus on something else, go about your business…” Now we KNOW, and as Paul Galley, of RIVERKEEPER.org stated so well in yesterday’s interview, “anybody that tells you that we don’t have to worry about this in the United States, on the banks of the Hudson, you need to KNOW they are not telling you the TRUTH!” Thank you sir for your work and dedication to our country and it’s people. With the budget cuts the republicans are offering up, it will assure us all that we, as a country, we be significantly less safe from the natural disasters to come in an environment, the earth’s environment that is, that is heating up by the hour, creating stronger storms that will wreak havoc on every corner of the globe, the United States included. The U.S. Geological survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, will be adversely affected by the 61 billion dollar budget cuts, cuts to ‘discretionary spending’, (isn’t all spending discretionary?) as we get ready to enter a third crisis in the Middle East, in the country of Libya, more on that in a future blog, offered up by the House of Representatives three days ago. Holding a ‘hearing’ (window dressing anyone?) on the matter Thursday in Washington, was a JOKE as I believe the only people who may have noticed were the cameramen over at CSPAN. The most excellent congressman from the great state of Oregon, Peter Defazio, a democrat, was asked by thinkprogress.org how those cuts would effect our nation’s preparedness and response to calamities such as earthquakes, floods, tsunami’s, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions… As a bit of a background, the congressman’s district in Oregon was adversely affected by the Japanese quake and subsequent tsunami, destroying a harbor on the coast and sweeping four people out to sea, and had this to say, verbatim, to his fellow law makers and the world at large, “If you cut on detection of tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, severe weather events, you know, weather buoys, satellite observation of weather patterns, you know, those types of things, people will die. People will die from tornadoes in the Midwest, hurricanes or volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes, so cutting on the preparedness funds that go down to the local organizations, down to the cities and counties who have got to be the first responders is…” he did not finish his sentence, so I will fill in the blank, CRAZY!” Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce, said that long range weather forecasting would be reduced from seven days to three days, saying in a statement, “There’s no way that we can avoid comprising the programs that safeguard our country.” So the next time you hear about a tragic story of a tornado striking say, Kansas, my grandfather’s home, and people were killed as a direct result of a LACK of warning, with technology that exists today to warn them, but does not, due to lack of funding for such an important function of a real government ‘of the people’, you might just want to think twice when you pull that voting lever for a republican in the next election cycle. Going even further than Locke, the Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Marcia McNutt, said this in a hearing two days ago on Capitol Hill, “Japan was just hit with a tragic and devastating 9.0 earthquake and Tsunami, and shame on us if we don’t learn from their misfortune.” Christian Parenti appeared once again on the ED SHOW, a must watch TRUTH telling machine, I’m telling you, the Thursday night edition, who is the author of Tropic of Chaos, climate change and the new geography of violence, a must read, I’m also telling you, nicely of course, and also a contributing editor for theNATION Magazine, and said this regarding the cuts the republican puppets are proposing that will adversely effect a good part of our nation’s national security, if you are at all interested in saving people’s lives, especially when we have the technology to do just that…”These cuts remind me of 1994 and what the republican party did back then. These cuts are not only stupid and greedy, but there’s a political logic to it, and it relates to the history of nuclear safety. In this context, what happened was after Three Mile Island, there was a real re-think about nuclear safety in this country. And there developed a whole infrastructure, the NRC pulled away from the industry, it was no longer captive of the industry, it had some autonomy–it was still always, essentially, very soft on them. Certain people in congress got very serious about doing investigations, and also about holding the industry accountable, and the industry pushed back, through the republican party, and slowly eroded (sound familiar?) this improvement in safety culture. The final part of that came in 1994, with the Gingrich revolution, where they did these same kind of cuts they are doing now, you’ll remember they were going to eliminate air traffic control, radar, all sorts of stuff, a lot of which did not happen because it was so crazy, but what happened at that time was that Pete Domenici (former Senator of New York) brought then, the head of the nuclear regulatory commission, and to him said, ‘I am going to gut your department unless you shape up and stop harassing the industry’. In other words, unless you go soft on allowing the re-licensing of plants, overlook these violations, etcetera, etcetera, and you see what happened was that nuclear safety declined, you know, there were less enforcements by the nuclear regulatory commission, and the whole set of practices, and the whole set of personnel, were disintegrated, they just went away from the industry.” ED: “I grew up a good part of my life on the prairie, and those tornado warnings are invaluable for saving people’s lives, what happens with these cuts?” PARENTI: “Especially in the face of climate change, this is going to become increasingly important, there’s going to be more and more freak weather, and there needs to be preparation and planning for this. As you know, there is a wing of the republican party and they are in the ascendancy now, and they’re ideology has just sort of taken flight at certain times of any larger, RATIONAL interests, and they’re on a kind of Jihad, particularly in the face of this quake, the tsunami and the atomic meltdown in Japan, to consider cutting this stuff is INSANE, in my opinion.” My opinion too Mr. Parenti, my opinion too. Have a wonderful week end folks, please do not consider taking any wooden nickles from Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly or any of their friends. May GOD’S ETERNAL speed and grace be on the people of Japan and the workers who are attempting to put that water on those very hot “spent” radioactive fuel rods. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 18, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Friday morning, the eighteenth day of March, 2011, as you gaze upon “Chatham Light”, in, of course, Chatham, another small seaside village on Cape, similar in some ways to Osterville, which is one of the key landmarks distinguishing that very fine town on Nantucket Sound. I just returned a few moments ago from Chatham, a photo op if you will, for Cape Cod proper, as I needed some updates for my library of photos of Cape Cod scenery, here at little old seacapecod.net, for who really knows just how long this little sand bar created by the Last Great Ice, 11,500 years ago, will last. Mother nature may have something to say about that many decades from now, if we as a PEOPLE do not come up with some alternatives to fossil fuels, that, when used in the form we currently use it in, spew heavy carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that is causing the earth to warm, hence rising sea levels around the world due to the FACT that the polar ice caps are almost half MELTED, along with the alarming melting of Antarctica, Greenland, and all of the naturally formed glaciers around the world, glaciers that feed the rivers and streams, hence, clean drinking water for billions of people, as we all remember that water is, of course, the basic building block of LIFE itself on planet earth. Christian Parent’s book, “Tropic of Chaos”, ‘climate change and the new geography of violence’, was a guest recently on the venerable MSNBC news show airing every week night at 10 p.m. save Fridays, “THE ED SHOW”, and revealed this interesting information regarding nuclear power plants around the United States, as many in California look to the Fukushima power plant crisis, and wonder what will happen if those ’spent’ fuel rods, filled with uranium and plutonium “pellets”, fuse together and melt down, causing an untold amount of radioactive steam to pour into our atmosphere, creating havoc for the already taxed, yet resilient, Japanese people, even more than what the quake did itself, a 9.0 earthquake that hit one week ago today, as well as the devastating Tsunami, roaring through the northern part of that island kingdom, taking perhaps 15,000 souls with it. God be with them all. According to Parenti, there are 104 working nuclear power plants in existence in America today, most of them old, rickety and about to fall apart, like most of the bridges and roads in this country–‘just ask Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear, they’ll tell ya!” (credit, again, Rodney Dangerfield, and the classic film, circa 1978, Caddyshack). Most of the reactors are made of metal, such as Vermont Yankee and Oyster Creek in NYC, even though radiation embrittles metal, so it begs the question, ‘why are so many of the crucial components in those plants, such as the aforementioned, made of metal to begin with?’. There are 23 reactors in this country, that are similar to the Fukushima plant, all of which are up for renewal, of their license to operate, waiting for that brand new stamp of approval expected from REPUBLICORP, no surprise there, however, it may be a problem for most of them, according to experts, for these plants are over 40 years old, and the “NRC”, the nuclear regulatory commission, is not only planning to reinstate their licenses, giving them another twenty years of life, thus running far beyond the 40 years they were designed to operate, but many have been given what is known in the industry as ‘power upgrades’, allowing them to run at 120 percent of their DESIGNED capacity. “I mean you wouldn’t do that with a car or anything else, but they are doing it with ATOMIC POWER PLANTS,” said Parenti, as Ed asked, “How would you upgrade these facilities? How big of an investment?” “You could definitely manage these plants more stringently and efficiently, but if you tried to do this now, it would be next to impossible. It would be like bringing a 1972 Toyota on line today, you would most likely not sell that car, but they want to extend these things for another 20 years and run them at 120 percent of their originally INTENDED capacity.” Ed then asks, “The President has been advocating for new nuclear plants, is this a solution to all of this?” “The “new” nuke thing is a canard, it’s pie in the sky, the fact of the matter is until the U.S. government is going to socialize the cost of the new plants 100 percent, private capital is not really going to get involved, and all this stuff you hear from Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Devin Nunez, republican congressman from California, on how they want 100-200 new plants…that’s just smoke and mirrors, because Wall Street does not like nuclear power plants because they always go over cost, they’re dangerous, and really expensive. But, underneath all of that discourse, about the “new” nukes, and the “push” for them, is really about the push to RE-LICENSE them, to re-license this fleet of 104 existing reactors. That’s what is going on on the ‘down low’, while pushing these things way out beyond their intended life span, and way beyond their intended capacity,” Parenti responded. ED: “Looking at a map of those reactors on the west coast, there are a half a dozen that could be susceptible to earthquakes, how dangerous is that?” Parenti: “It’s pretty dangerous, I mean it’s very dangerous, from the beginning, people were complaining about that (in California). You’ll recall the movie “China Syndrome”, is set in California, and 12 days after that movie came out, in 1979, which was just a Hollywood kind of thing, Three Mile island went off. So, from the beginning, people were saying, why are you building an atomic power plant on the San Andreas fault line, and associated fault lines?! Those fault lines are still active, I mean, there is no reason to think that there couldn’t be a similar earthquake in California.” ED: “And those are old structures?” Parenti: “Yes, they are old structures, yes, they are old structures, again, radiation makes structures brittle, and those structures are embrittled, and it’s dangerous.” Thank you Mr. Parenti, thank you very much indeed. Dennis Kucinich, democratic congressmen from the great state of Ohio, said this regarding nuclear reform and oversight over the NRC, “I am concerned about what is going on,” as Kucinich is a ranking member on the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the NRC, “I have asked the NRC to come to Washington D.C., and give a full briefing on these things that are going on in Japan, as it relates to nuclear actors in the United States in particular. In a letter to the NRC, I say that any plant operator that has had any difficulties, let’s say, in any DISHONESTY, in the handling of a plant, that they should not have their license renewed, that they should be shut down, we cannot put the public at risk, anywhere in America, and I still site, in particular, a plant in Ohio, the Davis-Besse nuclear plant, which you may remember in 2002, was discovered to have a hole, in the head of the reactor, and was covered up by First Energy and presented the possibility of a catastrophe that could have been close to the level of Three Mile Island. So we have to make sure that all the bad actors in the industry are sorted out very quickly, and all these other plants, that are up for re-licensing, are going to have to undergo a close inspection, an excavation that is probably unprecedented in the history of the industry.” ED: “Is it easy to get these facilities re-licensed? Are you satisfied with the re-licensing of these facilities?” Kucinich: “Generally licensing is a perfunctory thing, you have so many of these facilities that are operating past the stage in which they were INTENDED to operate, and has been pointed out, the longer these machines, these plants, are operating, the more prone they are to break down. When you are talking about the prospects of these nuclear power plants breaking down, the consequences are quite severe. The plants were not meant to last more than forty years, so with the nuclear industry, trying to wring every last dime of PROFIT, out of these plants, you can understand it from their perspective, but from a public policy perspective, there are safety issues that have to be raised, and that’s why I’m asking the NRC to come to Capitol Hill and to give congress a full briefing so that members will have the opportunity to ask the NRC detailed questions on plants all across this country. Also, in my letter, I ask about the “Mark 1″ reactors (same reactors that are at the Fukushima plant in Japan), designed and manufactured by General Electric, and there are some questions that have been raised about them.” ED: “Would you advocate shutting down any of those facilities in America?” Kucinch: “Well, I have consistently advocated shutting down the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio, and it’s no secret the Perry nuclear plant was built on an earthquake area, which they had a 5.0 earthquake a couple of decades ago.” ED: “Has the NRC been honest brokers in all of this?” Kucinich: “Well, I think the NRC is going to have to step up right now. What happened in Japan changes everything. And it’s going to require the NRC to look at nuclear safety through the prism of what happened in Japan. Now some people will say, ‘they had an earthquake, and a Tsunami,’ look, we have two nuclear plants in Ohio, on Lake Erie–that is a part of a chain of lakes that is the largest supplier of clean, fresh drinking water in the world, could you imagine if we had an event there that would cause a compromise of any of those reactor vessels? We have to be concerned about public safety, we have to look a what happened in Japan, as a cautionary tale, and so that’s why I’m asking the NRC to come forward and it’s time they laid all of their cards on the table, and answer some of our questions. It’s a whole new day, and we have to be concerned about the people in Japan. This has been a difficult set of circumstances.” ED: “Governor Richardson of New Mexico said this country is NOT prepared, your thoughts?” Kucinich: “Well, Bill Richardson would be in a position to know, and I think we have to be concerned about our readiness, this is going to cause a reappraisal about evacuation plans, in states where they have reactors in very populated areas.” ED: “What about the budget cuts?” Kucinich: “Of course we shouldn’t be cutting preparedness PRIORITIES, but Ed, you know what those budget cuts are all about, it’s not because of the deficit, (it’s because) they are cutting the budget in some areas so they can give tax (breaks) dollars to their friends in other areas. That’s another calamity.” Thank you Ed Shultz and Dennis Kucinich for that enlightening banter of utmost importance. So there you have it folks, the TRUTH, the whole TRUTH and nothing but the TRUTH! Go Buckeyes to win it all this March Madness basketball tournament! Have a wonderful week end everyone, and may GOD’S continued grace be upon the people of Japan and those heroic workers, the FUKUSHIMA 50, who are risking their lives for their fellow man. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 17, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Thursday morning, the seventeenth day of March, 2011, or as the Irish call it, Saint Patrick’s Day! And a Happy one to all of my Irish brethren out there in New York City, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, Newport Beach, California, as well right here on little old Cape Cod, Massachusetts. May the sun always be shinin’ in your face, the wind at your back, and the road always rising to meet you! Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to all, for on this day, everyone is Irish! I visited Ireland for the first time when I was a freshman attending college in England. I marveled at the depth of green, the many shades of green, on that beautiful island in the middle of the North Atlantic. The people are warm and friendly, as they tend to like American citizens a little more than the English, with each town offering another secret, concealed in the form of a Leprechaun. Many say Leprechauns do not exist, but I tend to think they just might, as one drifts back to the land of the shamrock and the misty, cool days with endless green hillsides carrying one along to a place that few, including me, never wanted to leave. I love Ireland, and it’s people and I will return soon. The St. Patty’s day parade is always held in Boston where, actually held in South Boston, the location of the event, as Boston has, perhaps, the largest Irish population in the United States next to New York City. Many years ago, when the Irish first arrived on these shores, they were not treated very nicely, in fact, there were many signs that read, “Irish need not apply.” Now, of course, that notion is ridiculous, and perhaps that fact gives us pause to look at our Muslim brothers and sisters living in this country today, who make up the 1.4 billion Muslims living in the world presently, with a little more sympathy, or at least empathy, if you, or any of your loved ones, have ever been treated less than what a human being should be treated like, respected and revered for being just another one of GOD’S children. To quote Sargent Hulka from the venerated classic film, ‘STRIPES’, starring Harold Ramis and Bill Murray, “We’re all in this together, one of these men may save your life someday,” with Bill adding, “then again, maybe they won’t.” That’s really the rub, is it not? May a little of the Irish LOVE rub off on the island nation of Japan today and see her people through what is perhaps one of the worst natural disasters in modern times, GOD’S SPEED to them all! Have a wonderful day folks and keep those Irish eyes a smilin’! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 16, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Wednesday morning here in Osterville, a football toss away from Hyannis Port, the home to the late, great 35th President of the United States, Jack Kennedy and his beautiful wife Jackie, that you can just make out the tip of in the image you see above you, a March day of seasonably cool temperatures and brilliant blue sky. I thought I might add a little optimism, as it is actually quite foggy here on Cape Cod and the islands, with rain expected. However, the temperatures will rise to 60 degrees tomorrow, and my plan is to get out and do some biking on these old country roads that wind around the Nantucket sound like a blanket. It is a true joy to live on Cape Cod–winter, spring, summer or fall. We can say one thing about the nuclear threat in Japan unfolding at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the northeastern part of that island kingdom that was demolished in this past Friday’s 9.0 quake, that was followed 15 minutes later by a wicked Tsunami that wreaked havoc on the Northeast rural area(s) of Japan…with that one thing being whether or not nuclear facilities in say, California, the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in particular, that sits on a very dangerous fault line in central California, are really all that safe, or are they safe just because “officials” (from the corporation) tell us so, begging the question, are these facilities ABLE to withstand what nature very likely will be dealing out soon, on the dreaded 40,000 kilometer long Pacific Ring of Fire, shaped in a giant horseshoe, namely, a similar quake of equal or even greater magnitude in an area, such as southern or northern California, that has been overdue for a large quake, or “the big one”, for 300 plus years now. This does not even get into the debate over the lack of evacuation routes that some would say you might need a boat, a big one, to take you out of the L.A. basin should a quake strike and cause a massive problem at one of California’s two nuclear facilities that are sitting next to, or on top of, active, dangerous fault lines, that credible scientists have told us for years now, are ready to rumble. Because there are only four roads going in and out of that area that has over 10 million people, forgetting about Orange County which offers another 5 million plus. Of course, our friends–and I say that with all sincerity, because we ALL know they are really trying (you know what they say, ‘trying is lyin’!) to be human, but, sometimes, it just takes too much out of them, in Washington D.C., wonderful friends with the little, itsy, bitsy “r” next to their name, that could also be the first letter to an equally demeaning word, not politically correct to use in news blogs, that is often interchangeable with the word, “republican”–with, or would, have you believe that worrying about nuclear safety and the damage it could cause our population, not to mention our planet, is akin to worrying about the radiation from the sun, or taking an airplane trip, or using the F#$cking microwave oven! Same old thing, as Sargent McConnell snivels, “nothing to see here folks, just a category 6, out of 7, nuclear accident that may, or may not, cause cancer down the road, and if you are pregnant, well, give us a few weeks to think about that one and we’ll get back to you”, something like that Senator? One scientist put it this way, “it is like placing an egg on a wobbly table and having a herd of Elephants, excuse the unintended metaphor, I happen to love African Elephants, stomp on through, all while betting the ranch on whether or not the egg would fall off the table, where it is not attended to by anyone or anything.” Full disclosure, I am that environmental scientist, however, I give full credit to all the nuclear physicists, nuclear engineers, among other men of science, out there who are on top of this thing, for it truly does offer a glimpse into our future as a species, who are struggling with energy, and the finite amount of it, while balancing the effects, and, more often than not, when things go awry, after effects, of that energy source–be it coal, oil, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydrogen. Eventually, the benefits of some (oil, coal) will be outweighed by their negative after effects (“can someone say, ‘carbon emissions equals global warming’, sure I knew that you could”, credit the late, great Fred Rogers and Public Television) that short term sellers, oil and gas speculators, on Wall Street don’t give a damn about, but your grand kids will. My money is on the elephants. Again, astonishing images from BBC World News America, as Matt Frei brought the coverage LIVE from Tokyo, and provided us all with a real live glimpse into the lives of these poor Japanese people whose whole towns have been swallowed by the sea. One story involved an older Japanese man who stood on the small hill overlooking a valley that, as far as the eye could see, had been literally wiped out, wiped from the face of the earth, by this 10 meter high ‘harbor wave’, the literal translation of the word Tsunami, for the waves had carried the debris, consisting of houses, cars, boats, you name it, right up to his back lawn, right up to the very edge of his back window, I’m talking two feet away!, with the high water mark staining the wood five feet up. The man, looking out at the devastation, spoke very lightly, yet solemnly, for he knew he, along with 5,000 other souls, had been spared the nightmare of a town that lost two thirds of it’s 17,000 person population. It was a haunting image. In that similar story, were images of the efforts of members of that same town, who have banded together, bringing snow down from a nearby mountain, boiling the water, pooling food, and basically taking care of one another, as they, the majority of them, had lost everything, and were now in the care of a power much greater than themselves, working together to make a sad, bad situation, tolerable, if not comforting, with the spirit of giving shining out as they begin to renew LIFE again, in a sea of death and despair. Financial uncertainty is also a byproduct of this disaster, with the Nikkei average dropping 16 percent by the closing bell yesterday. Japan’s, being the third largest economy in the world, work stoppage, will have an impact on markets in other countries as well, as they are the manufacturer of several important chips that are used in the new ‘fancy’ hand held computers, like smart phones, phones ‘everybody’ has these days, like an extra appendage, my God, so there may be a delay in the new Apple 3 I pad, coming out right after the new Motorola Zoom 2, that interestingly came out before the Motorola Zoom 1, I’m not sure about you, but damn! that is some real live wizard (bleep) from the boys and girls down on Madison Avenue! So keep on making (bleep) we don’t really need in this country and us (bleep, bleeping, bleeps) down here in the world of make believe will have you believin’ you need ‘dis, ya’ll! So, yes, the “financial” impact on Japan is real, but what is really, real are the tens of thousands of poor Japanese in the rural fishing villages to the north of the 1 in 10 people living in Tokyo, who have no food, no water and no where to go to escape a possible stage 6 melt down of some kind while the whole world watches on. What is also very real, are the heroic efforts of nuclear power facility workers, at that site, who are risking their own lives to put out the heat on those fuel rods, especially the ’spent’ fuel rods that still have plenty of kick left, plenty of radiation coming from the core nuclear ingredients in reactor number 4. The Japanese people, having studied Japanese history in college, are a proud and historically isolated group. Being and island nation, they were not conquered until World War II, although they had occasionally, perhaps in 1000 A.D., been invaded by Mongolia, and therefore, it is not in their nature to accept outside help from anyone. But, as the world becomes smaller and smaller, with instant communication available 24/7, video and all, we can feel empathy towards our brothers and sisters in need, as we all hopefully start living together as one species on a planet that needs our attention soon, i.e. the environment, or all of this was just a big waster of time. The problems of the world are GLOBAL, yet we have the POWER to act local. GOD’S SPEEDto the people of Japan, and may some peace come your way soon! Have a nice day everybody. PRESERVETHE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 15, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this glorious Tuesday morning here on Cape Cod and I pray that you and yours are safe and warm wherever this ‘message in a bottle may be reaching “ya’ll”.’ Sorry about that, sometimes I just can’t help myself from using that quaint southern phrase that always seems to denote “friendliness”, but when used in Palinesque terms, it turns on you a little bit, with a hint of sarcasm and anger towards anyone with a viewpoint that borders on sanity…but, I digress. My heart goes out to all of the people of Japan this early morning here on the east coast of the United States, and from seacapecod.net please know that WE all stand behind you in this epic struggle of a three punch nature. The combination of the earthquake that struck at 2:46 p.m. Japan time on Friday last, and the wicked Tsunami that ensued, literally engulfing entire towns, some as large as Sendai, with over a million souls, taking with it entire buildings, ships of all sizes, cars, trucks, and people, now washing ashore by the thousands, is now being added to by the real threat of a nuclear meltdown in the number two reactor in the Fukushima nuclear facility, where a core group of engineers are desperately trying to cool the metal rods that house the uranium that is heated to create electricity, putting this nuclear disaster at the number two position behind Chernobyl and ahead of the Three Mile Island disaster here in the U.S. decades ago. No one really knows the outcome of the nuclear facility as of yet, as scientists, notably a group called “concerned scientists”, international in scope, scramble to determine just how dangerous this radiation exposure will be for the tens of thousands of people who live beyond the rather conservative 12 mile ‘no man’s land’ that the government has already established. Over 10,000 people have been estimated to have lost their lives, with over 500,000 people evacuated from various points to the north, and over 2 million without power. The Nikkei average has dropped 6 percent in Monday’s trading, and with plants like Nissan, Toyota and Sony closed due to rolling power outages, as most of Japan’s energy comes from nuclear power, and it is hard to determine Japan’s economic future as many are without homes and basic supplies like food and water. Yet, as one journalist from BBC America, Katty Kay I believe,pointed out, in a brilliant broadcast last night, bringing us glimpses of the damage caused by this massive Tsunami, that the Japanese people, despite all of this devastation, are resilient, markedly so, giving us all pause to say a prayer for their plight andGOD’S SPEEDfor their recovery. Moving on to the natural, or rather unnatural disasters going on in other parts of the world, we turn now to our seasoned reporter in Washington D.C. to give us a sneak peak into what those rascal republicans are up to now…take it away Calgon! I’m of the mindset that the good in people will shine through in the end. That eventually “REPUBLICORP”, as it is now widely KNOWN, is an ugly, dirty term that “hits the nail on the head”, as to what is really going on in ‘this here U.S. of A.’ The epic outbreak of greed we see now on Wall Street, stoking the engines of legislation that was, and IS equally bought, one Senator, one congressman, one federal judge, on district court judge, on governor, and God forbid, one President at a time, that buys, of course, what the “man behind the curtain”, wants–the “man behind the curtain”, some being the captains of industry, the CEO’s of the big insurance, big oil, big banks, big coal, big natural gas, big retail, big pharma, you know, the Fortune 100 companies, and the small number of people who OWN them, now global (for tax reasons), who control the world’s natural resources, as well as the majority of it’s human resources, thus, controlling the ‘mind set’ of said pejorative population in many countries around the world–and what they want IS ultimate power to continue with the status quo, with no outside interference, as in regulations of any kind, regardless of how important they are, such as nuclear safety or deep offshore drilling regulations. America, being the largest, purely capitalistic society, that developed and distributed it’s business model to the world, or at least that is what Republicorp wants, leads the way in this “downsizing” of the middle class in the United States, as the newly elected corporate puppets strip the last defenses of a common sense (see Thomas Paine and the book authored by him, “Common Sense”) democracy, one we fought and died for 236 years ago. This downsizing includes the most vulnerable of our society, the working poor and the indigent, the ‘walking dead’, the masses of homeless people that we all turn our back on usually by screaming something like, “get a job you bum!”, when that “bum” could be a laid off teacher who just lost everything due to that “downsizing” of public education, and could not afford to pay his mortgage, while at the same time, his wife and kids left him, leaving him in a depressed, dare I say suicidal spiral to the bottom, hell, that could be anyone you have ever met in this current climate of “no honor amongst thieves”. The downsizing also cuts into the environment, because we can always ‘create’ a new one right, who’s with me?, where the ‘puppets in charge’ in D.C., a new reality tv show coming out on FOX this fall, have 61 billion dollars in cuts planned for the twelve percent of the ‘discretionary spending’ that is on the chopping block for now, as they grind their axes for another day regarding social security, medicare and medicaid. These cuts proposed by republican law makers cut to the bone and through it, as some fine reporters have put it (credit TRMS/MSNBC), slashing the EPA, the environmental protection agency, by 3-5 billion, creating a virtual loophole for the oil and gas, not to mention coal industries, where they will be able to continue emitting carbon dioxide into OUR atmosphere at alarming levels, with no real restrictions, thus producing more of the ‘greenhouse’ gases that do what you would think happens in a real greenhouse, raise the temperature of the room, or the earth if you will, like with the sun warming the glass, hence raising the temperature in said greenhouse, the carbon dioxide, with no where to go, gathers in the atmosphere creating a blanket that holds on to the sun’s solar heat, and as the temperatures continue to rise, as science has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, the polar ice caps begin to melt, which acted as mirrors before they began this melting process, deflecting a large percentage of the intense heating mechanism of the sun “shine’s” light, thus, creating a vicious cycle of continual warming that will have devastating global consequences in the not too distant future, yes, those puppets have been busy ridding US of those dirty environmentalists who constantly speak of global warming, or, for those of you who live in the world with your head in the sand, like the Ostrich, the politically correct terminology, “climate change”. This all being done in conjunction with the fact that defunding the EPA to the point of it’s very existence being inconsequential, will allow the monsters who are causing all of this to happen, corporations like Halliburton and KOCH INDUSTRIES, to now have free reign to continue with their terrorist activity of “fracking”, which is systematically destroying our fresh drinking water supply, perhaps irreversibly, for tens or tens of thousands of years. ‘Fracking’, the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock deep below the earth’s surface in order to gather ‘natural gas’, being done by companies like KOCH, are dumping their waste, or rather, not even bothering to clean it up to begin with, called ‘processed water’, ‘water’ containing 596 deadly chemicals, that is left over from the high pressure water procedure, in the ground in over 37 states now, and as it finds it’s way into our drinking water supply, many more Americans will meet the same fate as the good people in the foothills of Rifle, Colorado have already felt–intense physical and psychological damage, not to mention all of the dead plants and animals who wash up on the river bed surrounding that town. It’s an expansion on the “HalliburtonLoophole” created in 2005, by our previous “vice president”, Dick Cheney, who opened up public land in Wyoming to drill for natural gas, without any regulation whatsoever. I’m sure we can trust old dick, can’t we? Oh, and as a bonus, we’ll throw in the enormous levels of airborne toxins emitted from the well heads themselves, wells that now dot the landscape in, again, over 37 states now, from sea to shining sea. Take the Dallas/Fort Worth area, where over 15,000 wells make that urban area more polluted on a daily basis than the worst days of pollution alerts in the Los Angeles basin, and if you have ever been to L.A., you know how bad the “smog” can be. Thanks David and Charles Koch!, we look forward to building a statue in your honor, complete with a gas mask, a shovel and headstone, for you and your friends represent death. The last, and certainly not least, of the whole “downsizing thing” is the “problem”, according to anyone with an ‘r’ by their name, of EDUCATION. With the well of KNOWLEDGE gone from public education, with the new ‘plan’ being taxing the poor to pay for new charter schools that will more likely than not, according to most experts, serve rich kids from rich neighborhoods, and as this becomes the norm, and as we simultaneously slash, say, as the republicans propose, another 5 billion from that budget, effectively crippling it, especially in inner city and rural school systems, the deterioration of our children’s, all of our childrens’ futures will become a reality for millions, as they have no path out of poverty, which was the ‘plan’ all along. Future teachers will then opt for a different career path, lending their talents out to different, better paying, and more rewarding sources of employment, thereby leaving those millions of kids much less educated than they ought to be. This fact coupled with the equally disturbing fact that their ‘collective VOICE’ has been silenced, starting with the southern states, and then moving north to great states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, not to mention the great state of Michigan, go blue!, where, especially in Wisconsin, I’m sure WE can all agree, the whole fiscal meltdown, pardon the phrase, of 2008, global in scope, was not caused by the fraudulent banksters of Wall Street, making bets on other people’s lives, real people like your grandmother or your neighbor down the street, who lost half of the value of, say, their 401(k) in the house of cards, a completely rigged system of Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs, who then turned the fiasco into an opportunity to borrow more money form OUR Federal Reserve Bank at 0 percent interest, and then, instead of re-investing in OUR nation, making amends for their mistakes, while correcting the corruption so that it won’t happen again, no, they double down and tighten credit on small business, lending out at 20 percent at best, or, in the ‘pay day loan’ scenarios, 440 percent interest, and as they turned the corner for the ‘finish line’, they were given the greatest present of all, the ‘gift that just keeps on giving all year long’, (credit Randy Quaid from the classic film “Christmas Vacation”), the 2009 ‘Supreme’ court ruling of Citizens United, a decision by that rather suspect court that has opened up the flood gates for special interest monies, both foreign and domestic, to enter the political arena, paving the way for the bulldozer to follow, as has already been evidenced by Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker’s bully move to literally take away a worker’s right to have a voice, let alone a vote, became reality–which is the real agenda here anyway. This folly of a decision by the extreme right tilting court, hand picked by corporate interests, just ask Clarence about the accommodations in Palm Springs, “he’ll tell ya” (credit Rodney Dangerfield/film-Caddyshack), now views corporations as people, and with the capability to pour billions of dollars into governorship races, you saw what happened in the last election with republican governors picking up many northern states, along with the state senate races, congressional races, U.S. Senate races, district court judge races, and ultimately the Presidential race coming up in 2012, there seems little the democratic party can do to stem the tide of special interest corrupt cash, and hence our nation in general seems to be in peril of a hostile takeover of monumental proportions. As if the corporate monies were not bribery enough, the corporations can now hand pick their puppet of choice and then expect his, or her, Legislative wish list to be completed, for REPUBLICORP will be run like a corporation, with no sassing from those pesky democrats–who we will run out of town on a rail. This all being done in the name and “for” the “American People”, as head as$holes in the House and Senate, Boehner and McConnell speak so often of, making me literally want throw up on the television monitor, speaking of them as if they really have their best interests in mind and who they have, like Jesus, a deep, close and personal relationship with. Those “American People” are the ones who carry the burden of this often used word, “sacrifice”, all while they somehow convince those same American people that their slave owners, the top tenth of the top one percent, DESERVE to have tax breaks in this hour of “shared sacrifice”, for the complicated trickle down voodoo economics that you and your children don’t need to know about right now, with monies borrowed from China, while they claim the mantle of “shared sacrifice” at the same time, with no sense apparently of any shame whatsoever–truly convincing up to 55 percent of the American public the billionaire boys club is not only right, but righteous, and “we” should ALL somehow feel sorry for them and there suffering, therein creating the most beautiful definition by example of a real life Stockholm Syndrome the world has ever seen. “The world has ever seen…” Never before have so many people been duped into believing this GIANT LIE the republican party really represents, a continuation of “curveball”, the stooge used by the previous administration to sell the illegal war in Iraq, (see “60 minutes”/CBS- 3-13-11), the smoking gun of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, that was accented by Bush’s performance one night in a speech that ended with his words, “ending in a mushroom cloud…” So with the unions gone, the environmental protection agency about to go by way of the DoDo bird, our last line of defense against corrupt, maniacal corporations like Halliburton and KOCH Industries, as it’s budget is cut to the bone, not to mention the securities exchange commission (SEC) and the internal revenue services, and, I almost forgot, the newly formed consumer protection agency, along with the mineral management services, and finally, as cannot be mentioned enough, with the cutting of most public education across the board, exacerbating our national crisis of higher learning in this ever dumbing down of America, via real test scores, putting us in the same company as developing nations, all culminates in the proverbial frosting on the cake, the slashing of federal funding for public television and national public radio, eliminating one of the last voices of reason and common sense on our airwaves, airwaves that are filled with insane, toxic waste dumps like Rush Limbaugh and his fellow lunatic imitators, the hate filled paranoia machines, carnival in nature, promoted as “entertainment”, or brainwashing if you want to be technically correct, that now fill the air 24/7, saturating the airwaves of every town, city and county, leaving no other alternative voice, the “Other Voice”, if you will, the one of reason, love and kindness, whose “air” is now mostly owned by huge corporate conglomerates who maintain all editorial content and therefore, brainwashing control, whose interests do not lie in the Arts, the Environment, in Music, or in the Books of any value, or in matters of Spirituality, no, rather sadly, their interests lie in the dumbing down of America to the point where the masses are merely sheep to be herded into being told what to buy, where to buy it, how to buy it with and who to buy it from and where to work to earn the money to buy it to begin with, keeping the ‘economy’ going for THEM, yes, the “real economy”, the bigger picture, and when you add the declining test scores for the students who do want a real education, to learn to THINK for themselves, therefore hopefully helping the society as it sees itself clear of this current storm, yes, when you add all of these factors in, as you add those FACTS to the silencing of free knowledge via public radio and television, not to mention stripping out the arts from the classrooms, that enriches children at a young age, when they need it the most, yes, when you combine all of these factors, and many that I have not mentioned because this blog is far too long already, thanks for hanging in there, I do have a point, you can clearly see how pleased the coming PLUTOCRACY must be at this juncture. For if 300,000 people, the top one tenth of the top one percent can own 80 percent of the wealth in this nation, taking 80 slices of a 100 piece pie, leaving the remaining 309,700,000 million people left to divvy up the remaining 20 pieces, you must agree on one thing, “It don’t look like no democracy I ever seen…!” This is a sham and an outrage on so many different levels it would take more than one blog to quench the fire I have in my soul to let the world know how greedy and corrupt the United States of America has become. It is a sad statement. Not about it’s people, but about it’s leaders, who are only interested in the welfare of corporations and have left it’s people to fend for themselves, in a cold, dark world of global corporate indifference, indifference to human suffering and human “shared sacrifice.” America’s essence, her soul, has been held hostage for too long, and her Liberty has been hijacked and hoodwinked into believing that all of this was somehow the fault of 98 percent of the good, honest, hard working American people, who do most of the living and dying in this great nation, a nation at the crossroads, not Karl Rove’s Crossroads/GPS, but a real one, with a battle that will be forthcoming. That is precisely why I believe some corporations will see the folly of their ways, come back into the LIGHT, before it’s too late, and redeem themselves from their evil ways. There’s a word for you, evil. Think about it, do I exaggerate, or do I paint a true and accurate portrait? As a quick side note, I wanted to answer Lawrence O’Donnell’s question, well, three of them really, on his venerated show, “The Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell,” airing every week night at 8 and 11 p.m. EST, only on MSNBC, where he asked some questions of Michelle Bachmann’s sanity and/or ignorance level–Bachmann, the fine, upstanding bat$hit congresswoman from the great state of Minnesota, who does not seem to know her geography very well, or her American history. His first question was a) how ignorant is Michelle Bachmann and how did she get that way? (no academic reason, as she is a law school graduate, as well as nothing to do with the median income in her 16th district in Minnesota, of roughly 63,000 dollars a year) and b) where did she get her shockingly ignorant staff who, as I have written about before in previous blogs, told us, Bachmann that is, via her brilliant staff, that the founding fathers ended slavery, when that was not, by any stretch of the imagination the case, as the real beginning of the end of slavery began with the Emancipation Proclamation by our sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, who was solely responsible for the freeing the slaves brought from the continent of Africa. So, if second grade math serves me, yes, it does, thank you Ms. Wilcox, my second grade teacher, I will always love you, this all happened seven decades and ‘four score’ after the founding fathers had already begun to retire and then move on to their eternal resting place in Heaven. Nice try Michelle, and further, to her comment about ‘the shot heard round the world in your’, as she speaks to a crowd in the state of New Hampshire, ‘home state in the towns of Concord and Lexington’, actually right here in my home state of MASSACHUSETTS lady!, so I could not resist the temptation to answer a few of Lawrence’s frustrating surrender to those tough questions, such as the question of the 52 percent of voters in her district who buy into her Kool Aid cookiness. How can they be that ignorant?, in other words, Lawrence was asking… I will give my best answer to the question of ‘where does Michelle find such interesting help?’ Answer: Michelle Bachmann’s staffers are actually closet LIBERALS who secretly hate Michelle Bachmann and everything that the fake grass roots ‘tea party’, the cloaked corporate takeover, stands for, what the whole thing represents. So, in order to insure she is not elected to the high office of President of the United States, or for another term for that matter, they ran a few ‘test balloons bloopers’, easy enough to hide, gaffe’s designed specifically to make her look stupid, but not too stupid to be noticeable enough that someone might suspect fowl play, as in ‘an inside job’. This being successful, it destroys her chances of anyone with half a brain taking her seriously as a candidate and saving, really, all of our lives. These, Lawrence, are true American heroes, who demand our respect and our thanks, for a job well done. Saving us from one “michelle bachmann” at a time.GOD BLESS US ALL! Have a nice day folks and don’t take any wooden nickels! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 14, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Monday morning, the fourteenth day of March, 2011, a calm morning, as seen above, here in Osterville, the tiny, tiny seaside village that may as well define Cape Cod as a whole, with beautiful scenery, wildlife and architecture dating all the way back to the days of the Puritans, who came over from England in the mid seventeenth century… The devastation in Japan is something that is difficult to put one’s head around, as it has now been reported that the death toll may climb to over 10,000 souls. Complicating this natural disaster is the man made problem of nuclear power, namely, the Fukushima Nuclear power plant that has now seen two very large hydrogen explosions in two of it’s reactors, with all three most likely emitting deadly radiation that has caused Japanese officials to commence evacuations of over 200,000 people living in and around the nuclear facility. Another big concern is the cooling systems that have failed, completely, prompting officials at that site to pump in sea water to cool the fuel rods that are dangerously close to the 5000 Fahrenheit temperature that, upon reaching that level of heat, begin to break down and melt, causing a similar scenario that happened a few decades ago at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in the then Soviet Union, where millions of people were adversely affected by radiation poisoning in the world’s worst nuclear disaster, much worse than our own nuclear scare, “Three Mile Island”, where we saw first hand what a nuclear melt down would feel like and what it’s devastating consequences might have been. The movie, starring Jane Fonda, “The China Syndrome”, came out at about the same time as that disaster, if memory serves, prompting us all, around the world, as evidenced in recent protests in Germany over the week end, to take a little closer look at the benefits of nuclear power, along with the negatives, such as a) where do we store all of the waste from the nuclear processes, and b) do we really have all of the tools in place to prevent a meltdown if say, an earthquake occurs or if, god forbid, war breaks out and the facility is bombed. Our overall energy problem is not going away, however, we seem to always make the mistake of playing the game of reaction, as in the bp oil disaster, as opposed to being proactive about our long term game plan of creating green sources of energy that would change the whole dynamic of our “energy problem” from San Francisco to Singapore. Eventually, as the earth’s atmosphere continues to warm, with the glaciers, the polar ice caps and huge land masses like Greenland melting away into the earth’s seven seas, causing those seas to rise by as much as 20-30 feet over the course of the next one hundred years, and that estimate being very conservative, we will be faced with the daunting task of playing catch up to a problem that is right here and right NOW. The real reason, as in what happened with the electric car in the 1970’s, we, here in the United States, lag way behind the rest of the world in coming up with new and greener sources of energy is simple–big oil, big coal, and yes, big nuclear do not want the apple cart to be upset, for it would damage their short term bottom line profit margins, thus, causing a decrease in the overall value of said corporation, which, of course, would decrease the value of the stock and hurt the ever connected banks on Wall Street, you know, the “elites” that really run the show in this here, ‘US of A’. Yeehaw!–who needs the ‘cowboy poetry festival’ in Nevada when you can have real live as$holes at Goldman Sachs do your poetic “justice” for you. You can see where I am going with this one, with the “little people” making one last ditch effort to have their voices heard, as the people in Wisconsin did this past week end in Madison, over the large, loud, ludicrous bullhorns of FOX NEWS and the like, whose propaganda machine(s) are busy working overtime to keep the masses in the dark, as it were, while their corporate bedfellows continue reaping giant profits off of the backs of the common man and woman in this nation, who breathe in the toxic waste left over, after the profit taking, by corporate monsters like Halliburton and Koch Industries. The same corporations who also pour mind bending amounts of toxic waste into our fresh drinking water sources everyday, in over 37 states now, mining for “natural gas” with the very unnatural method of “fracking”, a process that utilizes over 596 deadly chemicals, while, at the same time, allowing those chemicals to seep into the soil and hence, into our tap water, tap water that you can light on fire with a match–all while, as previously mentioned, emitting alarming levels of toxic airborne substances into the air–doing all of this irreversible damage to OUR land with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, if they are caught that is, as the EPA, the environmental protection agency, lacks the teeth, and soon the gums if the republicans get their way in the slashing of “discretionary spending” currently being considered to “solve” our fiscal woes in this nation, woes that were not caused by the overpaid teacher or the poor elderly woman who is in need of heating oil, but, rather, by the greedy monsters of Wall Street– yes, this all being done by design, because REPUBLICORP removed said ‘teeth’ from the EPA for PROFIT, leaving the EPA with no power to do a damn thing about it…this now seeming to be the rule of a very sick, seditious profit model design at the very moment we need a glimmer of sanity in Washington D.C.. The EPA is in trouble of becoming inconsequential, one of the agencies where they plan to cut billions from, all in the name of “shared sacrifice”, while billionaires continue with the BUSH era tax breaks, no sacrifice there, borrowing money from China in order to give money away to the top one percent, say 100,000 dollars for those who make a million dollars a year or more. Shared sacrifice? Is this thing on? Who do the republicans really think, in the end, they are fooling? “Bueller, Bueller, anyone? Voodoo economics, anyone, anyone? Help me out here Ferris!” (credit actors’ Mathew Broderick and Ben Stein, as well as theclassic film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”)… It is hard to fool someone who has not eaten real food in a week, my friend. Have a nice day folks and ‘May the creative intelligence of the GREAT SPIRIT be with the Japanese people today’, and GOD’S SPEED to those 70 nations that are coming to bat for their fellow human beings in that beautiful island kingdom. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 13, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Sunday morning, the thirteenth day of March, 2011, a calm, sunny morning here on the Cape and Islands, a far cry from the devastation in Japan at this hour. The African Violet you see in the image above is for the people of Japan and the loved ones who lost their lives to the violence that is sometimes offered up by nature and her powerful arsenal of weapons that occasionally make life on this little planet hard to cope with, as evidenced by this massive 8.9 quake, Japan’s largest and the fifth largest recorded since seismic activity first started to be recorded, at the onset of the twentieth century. Our thoughts and prayers from Cape Cod and the Islands are with the people of Sendai, as well as all of the Japanese people this morning, as there is little we can do from this vantage point other than that, although we wish we could do more… Search and rescue teams from the U.K., Italy, China, the United States, among others, have descended upon the area to access and get to work rescuing anyone they may find in the devastation, as the death toll continues to rise at this 7 a.m. hour on the east coast of the United States. Again, our thoughts and prayers are with them ALL. I lived in California for a good part of my life, going to high school in Los Gatos, a town 50 miles south of San Francisco. Before that, when I was only 12 or 13, we lived north of that city in a town called Petaluma and I, like many I’m sure, have always been in great fear of nature’s most unpredictable fury–the earthquake. Every morning my father would wake and take a bus from Petaluma to San Francisco to work at his job. I will always remember watching him walk to the bus, down the hill from our home in Petaluma, to the bus station that would take him into the city, wondering if I would ever see him again. For the fear that arose when learning about earthquakes at that young age of 12, and the fact that northern and southern California were both due for “the big one”, 300 years past due, was always present, and irrational as it may have been, I asked God himself to take me before he took my father. Of course, that is not up to me personally, and the “big one” never came, however, it has always been in the back of my mind, as I have traveled the “Ring of Fire”, a horseshoe like 40,000 kilometer ring around the Pacific Ocean, chalk full of Volcanoes and tectonic plates that shift from time to time, and when they do, and we have, seeing what the world witnessed yesterday, a major shifting of the ground, we see violent movement that is capable of taking down a skyscraper, a bridge, or, as we saw in Sendai, an entire city. The Tsunami, a Japanese word that literally means “harbor wave” in Japanese, that was created by this tectonic shift called an earthquake, created a wall of water that was 10 meters high, and if you were able to see the footage on just about every television station around the world, you will have seen the utter destruction one of these ‘harbor waves’ can cause, picking up ocean liners, trains, cars, trucks, buildings, not to mention people, animals and plants, and tossing them as if they were merely children’s toys, scattering them like so many leaves in the wind. Both the southern San Andreas fault line, the meeting of the two “American” tectonic plates, with the major focus on the “pacific plate” in southern California, and the area from San Francisco all the way up the coast to Vancouver, British Columbia, is overdue for a “big one” of it’s own, 300 years overdue, and thus, we are all watching this epic disaster and wondering, “are we really ready for a quake of this magnitude?” I hope some responsible people in Washington D.C. are assessing that question with some degree of intelligence right NOW. For more on today’s events in Japan, I will be tuning into my favorite “Sunday morning talk show”, “This Week, with Christiane Amanpour”, on ABC, who will be LIVE in Japan at 9 a.m., EST, and I wish you and yours a very safe and warm Sunday morning, along with the people of Japan, whom I pray find peace and some degree of GOD’S LOVE coming out of all of this turmoil, we are all with you in the GREAT SPIRIT. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 11, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Very good to be with you on this Friday morning here in Osterville, a foggy morning at that, as it has been quite a busy 24 hour period in the world. We have witnessed the rat race taking a turn for the worse, with “Governor” Scott Walker pulling that SCAM on the people of Wisconsin, or rather his employers, the Koch brothers and their friends, that, like the Tsunami that just hit northern Japan at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time yesterday, the middle of the night for us here on the east coast of America, a 8.9 quake, will spread pain and suffering (”shared sacrifice”) to 98 percent of the “American People”, exactly what the republican puppets wanted all along–to strip common Americans of their basic human rights, bringing them one step closer to slavery. It is so sickening that I don’t have the stomach for it this morning. The quake that struck Japan however, is something that will grasp the world’s attention today. Footage from the air revealed Sendai airport inundated with a wall of water that looked as if someone filled up a bathtub and forgot to pull the plug. Other disturbing images were of cars, boats, houses and anything you can think of being swept away under the enormous pressure of the wall of water, estimates of 10 meters high, that struck the coast directly after the quake hit. Reports of 44 people losing their lives is the current death toll, with those numbers expected to rise as the towns and villages to the north of Tokyo are assessed, for that is where the worst of the Tsunami’s power was felt. Smaller pacific islands to the east of Japan are bracing for the worst, as their coast line is already at risk due to rising sea levels, due to global warming, or climate change if you are one of those idiots who don’t believe in SCIENCE, or the bloody truth, as they will most likely be swept away into the sea. May GOD be with all of our brothers and sisters of Japan and the region, with the hope that the rest of humanity on this little blue rock called earth step up to the plate and provide some relief and comfort. I will say this about all of the greed and horror REPUBLICORP and it’s key members have wrought on this land, our land, the United States of America–there is a reckoning coming, and it won’t be pretty. The days of plundering the earth and enslaving it’s people by corrupt and evil multinational corporations will end, maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon, and those who, and you know who you are, those who have destroyed this EARTH, it’s people, it’s animal kingdom and the rich plant life that sustains LIFE itself on this planet, not to mention our all important atmosphere, will be JUDGED accordingly–mark my words, or better yet, read your BIBLE, especially the words of Jesus Christ himself…MARK HIS–the man you all seem to have a real good beat on, a “personal relationship” with. Your hypocrisy, like the cars and boats being tossed around like toys in the sea of Japan, will be useless against what is to come and your lying lips will feel a sting of JUSTICE that you, or your kind, have never felt before….it is written and it is SO. Have a nice week end folks and may GOD’S continued speed be offered to those brave souls coined “The WISCONSIN 14!”, along with the rest of the good people of Wisconsin, perhaps the only good that has come out of your struggle is the fact that middle America, along with the rest of the nation and world, now KNOWS who the republican party stands with and who it does not–namely, the corporations and the people respectively. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 10, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Thursday morning, the tenth day of March, 2011, a rainy day here on Cape, as well as a rainy day in Wisconsin, as I just woke up to the fact that Governor Walker, a rabid republican puppet who works directly for big business interests such as the polluter Koch Industries, pulled the central issue of collective bargaining rights from the “budget crisis” portion of his original bill, and rammed it through in an illegal vote that took place yesterday afternoon around the dinner hour. This dirty move proves the ill intent of the good “governor” and sheds light on what the real agenda, nationally, IS for the republican party in 2012. The central issue of collective bargaining rights goes much deeper than simply negotiating salaries and improving upon working conditions. It goes to the core of what republican strategists, like the weasel and republican strategist Karl Rove, among others, want, or rather what the “men behind the curtain” who pay their exorbitant salaries want–namely, to destroy the common man and woman in this nation’s VOICE, in other words their VOTE, in the upcoming elections that is best served WITH the organizational support and power afforded by public employee unions around this country, unions that have shaped public and private industry policy towards the millions of workers around the nation who barely make enough to survive. Out of the top ten contributors to U.S. elections and the candidates therein, in 2010, three of them, numbers 6, 7 and 9 in that top ten list, were public employee unions, such as the teachers union for example. Taking away the RIGHTS of people, who work in the public sector, to organize and voice their concerns is not only un American, but illegal and, dare I say, leaning towards fascism, a road the republicans have been on for the past thirty years as multinational corporations position themselves to take over the whole political process and therefore, take over the whole of the country, killing public education, aid to the poor and the elderly, launching a culture war against women’s reproductive rights, demonizing gays, and stripping the Environmental Protection Agency, the vital EPA, of any power whatsoever, eventually turning this nation into a toxic soup wasteland of monumental proportions, with the only “winners” being the super rich, while leaving the ever poorer “American people” without a voice, without a leader and without any hope. Well done Governor, you have proven yourself to be the scumbag of this young 21st century! What’s your next trick, demonizing Mother Teresa? Here’s an idea, let’s burn NPR, national pubic radio, to the ground. Let’s kill Big Bird, Ernie, Burt, Cookie Monster, Oscar “the grouch”, Elmo, Snuffleupagus, Grover, Maria and the rest of that rag tag group who live, play and love on Sesame Street. While we’re at it, let’s kill the creator of the Muppet’s, the late, great Jim Henson, whose vision to bring LOVE and LEARNING into our children’s lives, making the world a little better place, even if only for that one hour show, is just over the top…let’s kill that creative spirit that is passed on through this wonderful television show that was created decades ago, a show called Sesame Street, where children of all colors, backgrounds, and religious affiliations can gather together and learn the fundamentals of the three “r’s”, reading, writing and arithmetic, along with the importance of loving one another, a lesson the republican party must have been absent for in one way or another. “Further, if we kill Jim Henson’s message,” sniveled the evil “brother’s KOCH”, “we are sure to destroy any hope for the poor children who will have no access to public education because we, our republican puppets, will have taken away all of it, replacing it with “vouchers” that are really used to tax the poor so that rich kids can go to private schools, yes, we will have taken away all funding for public education, in at least 16 states at present, all in time for the upcoming 2012 election cycle.” The only problem with killing Jim Henson is that it cannot be done. His spirit is stronger than any of your petty, irrelevant hateful and evil tricks, as I am about to describe, pulled by despicable “human beings” who are nothing more, ironically, than puppets on a string, controlled by the coming PLUTOCRACY, that does not give a damn about the real American people, rather, it cares only for it’s bottom line–the Almighty DOLLAR–a bottom that seems to have no bottom at all. This all being “echoed” in the deep, dark echo chamber of FOX NEWS, the propaganda arm of said multinationals and it’s “creator”, Rupert, “arrrghhhh matie”, Murdoch, whose main goal in this lifetime, and he will need quite a few more to get it right, is to dumb down America to the point where going “back” to common sense and it’s former place of our reality in this nation, will be next to impossible, for the Kool Aidbrainwashing propaganda machine he “created”, FOX NEWS, will have destroyed most of the brain cells of at least 51 percent of the “American People”, the puppets so often referred to as their “friends”, “friends” they would help find the missing wallet of that they STOLE, thus, assuring their complete cooperation in the new plutocracy, or ‘rule by the wealthy’, that will be unveiled soon, as part of it was already unveiled last night in Madison, Wisconsin. “Creating” a caste system of slave owners, the haves and the have nots, with no room at the inn for “intellectuals”, minorities, gays, “elitists”, environmentalists, “socialists”, or anyone who might “look Jewish”. So, with no further adieu, I give you James O’Keefe, whom you all know from his fraudulent ambush of A.C.O.R.N. and Planned Parenthood, the former being the low income assistance agency, nationwide, that was destroyed by the republican agenda, not due to the tricks the little sleaze ball pulled with his hidden camera, fooling no one of any real intelligence, rather, it was the plan of REPUBLICORP all along. ACORN represented more than just low income housing assistance. It offered a place for poor people to register to vote, offering them assistance in the form of maps and consul as to what polling places were safe, devoid of goon squads the insane, rabid and inhuman tea party radicals send out to intimidate minority voters, indigent voters and any other voter that may not want the fascists in power. ACORN gets the bottom out of the way, but what the republicans really want is to slay the dragon of intellectual acumen, combined with real KNOWLEDGE, the TRUTH, that is still available to the masses via public broadcasting, or real education via properly funded public schools. The whole point of ‘ruling the air’ is to drown out the ‘little voices’ that break down the armor of bull$hit, or bat$hit if you prefer, with “it’s” logic designed to entrap it’s audience into a state of constant panic, while launching perpetual negative assaults on it’s opponents, i.e. anyone who disagrees with the powers that be, at the moment, of the ruling plutocratic regime, with an ever call to arms and thus, WAR with your brother, because he is not a real “American”, hell, “he” thinks Obama was actually born in the United States, in a place called Hawaii…what a Loon! By going after NPR’s vital programming, along with targeting federal funding for PBS in general, viciously attacking ground breaking shows like “FRONTLINE”, perhaps the best documentary series on television today, is akin to asking FOX to remove it’s blond bimbos from the television sets of wherever those monsters are around Rockefeller Plaza, in New York City. In fact, ban all FOX sporting events too, and shut down that clown, I’m sorry, those CLOWNS Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly. While you’re at it, why don’t you $hit can the whole FOX NEWS network in general, a humanitarian move, especially that a$shole in the morning, the blond guy on “Fox and Friends”, Steve Douche, I mean Steve Douche, ooops, I did it again, Steve Ducey. So here he is folks, the “as$hole de jour”, I give you Mr. James O’Keefe, ‘conservative activist’ and all round, say it with me, “scumbag”, with his latest dirty trick to secretly tape one of the top executives of public radio, the President of NPR, Ron Schiller, who was lead to believe he was being interviewed by two members of a Muslim organization…O’Keefe’s website, by the way, is called “project veritas”. In the taped interview, I will supply verbatim, the former President stated some obvious TRUTHS as to what is really going on in this rabid republican “tea party”, which is really only an extension of the over bloated egos of criminal polluters like David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries–who created the tea party, from whole cloth, two years ago under the fake grass roots concept called “Americans for Prosperity”...an ironic name if I have ever heard one. AND ACTION! NPR’s Ron Schiller: “The current republican party, particularly the tea party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives, and very fundamentally Christian–I wouldn’t even call it “Christian”, it’s this weird
Evangelical kind movement. The current republican party is not really the republican party, it’s been hijacked by this group, that is… Q?: “the radical, racist, islamophobic tea party people?” Schiller:“…and not just Islamophobia, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they are, they believe in a sort of white, middle-America, gun toting…I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.” This great and good man, undoubtedly under pressure from NPR’s “corporate underwriters”, along with the CEO of NPR, were forced to resign, while the Murdoch’s of the world can just go on about the business of poisoning people’s minds, hearts and souls, one soul at a time, pumping their blatant lies and innuendo across America’s airwaves, with no consequences whatsoever, forcing it’s viewers, by proven forms of mind control, into believing anything they say, lock, stock and barrel–their beings filled with all of the hate, fear, rage, that is inside of “them”. What these “men” fail to realize is that they also carry in their unfortunate beings the hidden realization they are really looking for, in a word, LOVE, as all human beings do, whether they KNOW it or not. That special ingredient that could ultimately, and I pray for this, save them from themselves–the only thing that really matters in this LIFE and the one thing we take with us into the next plane–a rarely used little four letter word called LOVE! “Just ask Elmo, he’ll tell ya! He just bought property on the GOOD side!” (credit the late, great Rodney Dangerfield and his epic work on the classic film I quote far too often, Caddyshack, circa 1978). Have a wonderful day folks and May GOD’S continued grace be with the “WISCONSIN 14!” Although you may be going home today, the world knows what you did and for whom you did it and it won’t be forgotten in the coming battles ahead with this unscrupulous organization of wealthy “men” who are trying to hijack this country to serve their needs only, leaving the rest of America to twist in the wind. We will see who wins the WAR. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M

March 9, 2011

Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Wednesday morning here in Osterville, the ninth day of March, 2011, as you take a gander at one of the great schooners from my other favorite island, Martha’s Vineyard, looking like one of the British war ships that came ashore during the Revolutionary War in the latter part of the 18th century, I bid you and yours a fair and fine adieu. Although one could imagine that it is a corporate war ship that has come to take back America from the people and give it away to the wealthy top one tenth of the top one percent, the owners of said multinational corporations. Thank God it’s just a “Black Dog” ship, named from the famous restaurant and bakery in Vineyard Haven, where they sell the fabled profile of the Black Labrador retriever on everything from tee-shirts to coffee mugs. However, the analogy is credible, as we all watch 16 states now follow in the draconian footsteps of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker–crying wolf about state and local budget crisis’s, while they proceed to take away the last bastion of power from the democratic process, namely collective bargaining rights embedded within public unions, and moreover, that VOICE, for the common man and woman in this great land. Let us go back a moment in time to see what is really going on here. This financial crisis the country “seems” to be going through right now is real in one sense, Wall Street banks caused the meltdown and shortfall in those state and local budgets, and upon the election results of 2010, and the ushering in of newly elected puppets eager to do their corporate masters bidding, i.e. Scott Walker, the old bait and switch has been implemented in not only Wisconsin, that has received all of the press lately, but also in the states of Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as eleven other states soon to be in the news. What is happening here, historically, can be understood very clearly by reading NaomiKlein’s great book, “The Shock Doctrine”, a must read to understand fully the republican “thirty plus year plan” of privatizing this country via crooked capitalism that is destroying this nation one state at a time. Take for instance, Michigan, who, like Florida that I will speak of in a moment, has a governor who decided to raise taxes on the poor and the elderly, 1.6 billion dollars worth, under the auspices of “shared sacrifice” and “balancing the budget”, whereupon he then is turning around and giving it all away in the form of tax breaks to large corporations, exactly 1.7 billion dollars worth, leaving the state with the same budget deficit, while corporations gain an even stronger foothold into ruling the political might of Michigan. Adding more salt to the wound, Governor Rick Synder has now added a provision where he can appoint one person to literally take over a town that may be in trouble financially, dissolving the local government completely, with no questions asked! Welcome to Germany gov’na! Don’t believe me, google it and become knowledgeable on what is really going on in this here “US of A”. This is no joke and although Wisconsin WON the war, with Scott Walker’s bid to become the next Ronald Reagan going down in a flames, this country still faces the daunting challenge of REPUBLICORP’s wish list for at least 16 other states, like Michigan and Ohio, where the will of the people may be outnumbered by the will of the lobbyists in Washington D.C., who work there tirelessly for their employers, the multinational corporate owners who pull the levers of change, “changing the course of history”, as Scott Walker said in his fake phone call from David Koch, while scaring the public much like the Wizard did in the famous film, “The Wizard of Oz”, creating scary smoke and loud noises, designed to shock and disorient via fear and misinformation cloaked as “facts”, all from the comfort of his perch behind “the curtain”…until at last, Dorothy pulled that curtain back and said to the old, white man, “this aggression won’t stand man!” A simple test, as proposed by the ever gallant and highly respectable, by anyone with half a brain, journalist Rachel Maddow of “The Rachel Maddow Show”, airing every week night at 9 p.m., EST, only on MSNBC, called the “Rick Scott test”, a test that measures if your quality of life in a state in this great land will get worse due to a ’sound’ economic reality, e.g. oil prices rising in the U.S. due to the speculation market and the low limits to enter that arena, unrest in the middle east that was sparked by one street vendor who was slapped by someone who may have been Scott Walker himself, his middle eastern counterpart, the fact that their are no jobs in this country due to globalization in the form of outsourcing done by the multinational corporations that “hover” over countries for their own gain and their own interests, never really establishing a real relationship with it’s peoples, while they exploit said peoples of all of their natural resources and the human beings themselves, via cheap and immoral labor practices, sucking out every bit of life they can, and as they pull out, they will leave a horrible environmental disaster behind, for they can fight any local lawyers with their deep pockets, or the fact that Wall Street thieves have plundered the pension and 401(k) savings accounts of millions of unsuspecting American citizens in the largest bank fraud in American history, by way of the sub-prime mortgage predatory lending practices that took place in the early part of the 21st century, creating the ‘Great Recession’ that was, of course, world wide because “we” are a global economy. This predatory lending by big Wall Street banks, and thus, the toxic “assets” of said properties therein, were then bundled and re-bundled in extremely difficult to understand (needing a degree from MIT in advanced math to decipher) financial derivatives, or “credit default swaps”, all 600 Trillion of them, that’s trillion with a capital “T”, and because firms like Goldman Sachs, and “it’s” chairman and CEO Lloyd, “I’m not Bernie Madoff, I swear,” Blankfein fraudulently took bets against those derivatives, all while encouraging many of his clients to BUY them, “can you say jail, Lloyd, sure, I knew that you could”, (credit PBS and the late, great Fred Rogers for that one), yes, for any of these reasons aforementioned, you might buy into the republican’s argument of “our” fiscal crisis in this nation. But aside from any of these reasons, can you think of any other possible reasons why your, the American person reading this blog, life is not as good as it should be at this late year of 2011? CAN YOU? Enter the “Rick Scott test”. Notably, because Rick Scott, a newly elected governor, like Michigan’s Governor Snyder, of the great state of Florida, did not just use a state budget deficit to cut funding for public education, “down to the bone and through it”, as Rachel put it, no, he didn’t say our state budget is so bad I’ve got to cut education in order to save it, no, the “Rick Scott test“ says, “the reason your state budget is in such a mess in not due to the bad economy, it’s because you have a BAD GOVERNOR!” The reason, again according to Rachel, the reason he gets the bad governor test named after him is because Rick Scott found a way to make huge devastating cuts to education in a way that does not help the state’s budget at all! Rick Scott has just introduced his new budget in the state of Florida, taking 1.75 billion dollars out of the public schools and instead of giving that money back to the budget, thus “balancing it”, he turns around and GIVES IT AWAY to corporations and property tax breaks (for the wealthy Palm Beach property owners). So, K-12 education gets “absolutely eviscerated” in the state of Florida and the money that is saved, the money no longer being spent on the schools, doesn’t go to close the state budget gap at all, but instead gives the saved money away as tax cuts to wealthy corporations and their owners who pay all of their taxes to the tax shelters located in the Cayman islands. In other words, paying nothing in federal income taxes at all. So, again, as Rachel so perfectly put it, “you get all of the pain, with none of the gain.” Is your state about to become a much worse place to live in because of a budget shortfall, or is your state about to become a much worse place to live in because it’s just what your governor WANTS! Or, more to the point, what the coming PLUTOCRACY wants. “It’s the Rick Scott test, it’s empirical tax cuts for dummies…!!!” Kudos and BRAVO Rachel Maddow! In the immortal words of the late, great comic genius Graham Chapman of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, a product of the British Empire–“Yes, this theory of yours Anne, well, you seemed to have hit the nail right on the head.” Have a wonderful day folks and congratulations to the WISCONSIN 14! May the Grace of God continue to be with you and your families, we are all very heartened and proud of you ALL!PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M